It's In The Words We Say
A less traveled road to Truth
Hidden in plain Sight
Statement Analysis
The Words
Hidden In Plain Sight
Start with the basics, close your eyes and truly listen to what someone is saying. If you are too eager to respond and already formulate answers in your mind whilst the other person is still speaking or if you are distracted by body language instead of listening, you will miss crucial details in the discourse, details that could be indicative of deception.
Ask yourself, is the person trying to convince or to convey? A truthful person is more likely to convey information instead of attempting to convince you. Has the person really answered your specific question, or is he just putting up a smokescreen? Did the person deny the act (I didn’t do it) or only the conclusion that others have made (O.J. Simpson, “I could never do such a thing”)?
Ultimately it is the analysis of speech that holds the greatest promise when it comes to deception detection. But as counter-intuitive as it may seem, we are not looking for signs of deception. Because people tend to avoid outright lies, that would mean looking for something that is rarely there. Instead we are looking for the truth leaking through, and we are doing so by believing exactly what people tell us, word for word. The truth is hidden in plain sight; all it takes is for someone to really listen.
Most Communication Is Non-Verbal—Or Is It?
It is often claimed that words amount to only 7% of human communication. This assumption dates to Albert Mehrabian, who, many decades ago, introduced his often misrepresented rule (7% words, 38% voice and 55% non-verbal). If that rule were true, humans would never have developed speech.
But the publication of the 7-38-55 rule had a lasting impact on research in linguistics, as most attention and funding went into body language and non-verbal communication, a trend that only recently reversed. Meanwhile it was up to practitioners from around the world, mostly from specialised branches of law enforcement agencies, to develop their own linguistic tools as it became apparent how unreliable body language and non-verbal communication are when it comes to deception detection.
Seemingly independent from each other, several techniques were developed which, although not identical, overlap in content. These techniques come with different names, but the common denominator is an exact linguistic content analysis (LCA) of what is said or written.
What makes LCA interesting for practitioners is the fact that it intuitively appears to have merit. While scientific validation is still in progress, LCA is already applied by law enforcement agencies in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Israel, Mexico, the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Qatar, Singapore and South Africa, to name just a few countries.
The attractiveness of LCA is based on the fact that, as is the case with body language, word usage too is only partially conscious. Our mind controls what we are saying, at least as long as no emotions are involved, but it is often how we say the things we say, how we grammatically construct our sentences with all these pronouns, articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions etc. that allows a glimpse into the subconscious. We call these words function words. If you did our little experiment above, you have experienced for yourself how easy these words escape our attention.
Forensic Statement Analysis
There are several reasons why FSA is superior to other deception detection techniques. FSA does not infer what is not explicitly stated, it does not rely on interpretation nor does it require the study of baseline behaviour, history or context. If the statement is recorded, it can be analysed without any physical observation, and it can be learned based on known word definitions and the rules of grammar.
The most prevalent lies are lies of omission and paltering. No other deception detection technique has the capacity to detect if someone avoids a lie by simply skipping over the relevant parts (omission) or by using truthful statements to mislead (paltering).
Jim Lehrer: “No improper relationship”—define what you mean by that.
President Bill Clinton: “Well, I think you know what it means. It means that there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship, or any other kind of improper relationship.”
Jim Lehrer: “You had no sexual relationship with this young woman?”
President Bill Clinton: “There is not a sexual relationship—that is accurate.”
From NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 21st January 1998
Today it seems obvious, but at the time most viewers inferred from what the president said that he hadn’t had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky (ever). What he actually said was that he did not have (present tense) a relationship with Monica Lewinsky—which technically was a truthful statement because their relationship had ended months before that interview.
In FSA we take a statement as true even if we know it is a lie, and we do not infer anything. We believe the president that at that point in time he did not have a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but because he did not deny having had one in the past we cannot infer that from his statement. A basic FSA analysis would have revealed the tense change in Clinton’s response, it would have revealed the paltering and it could have led to more pointed questions from Jim Lehrer.
the words we don't speak
believing the liarS
If you want to find out what people really are saying, then you have to learn to listen and to pay attention to exactly what they are telling you, word for word. If you are already formulating an answer or the next question in your mind while your counterpart is still talking, you are losing the information that could lead you to the truth. To become successful in deception detection you have to change your mindset and, knowing that even the most sophisticated liar cannot hide his deception, believe exactly what people are telling you. Their own words will betray them if you know what to look for.
Statement Analysis
Function Words: a direct path to the subconscious
The average English speaker has about 100,000 words in his vocabulary, and fewer than 500 (or 0.05%) of them are function words (pronouns, articles, prepositions, negations, conjunctions etc). Despite their small number, function words comprise about 55% of what we hear, read and speak, and most of the time they completely evade our awareness.
Were a speaker to try to control the application of function words, the cognitive load would be so demanding that it would severely disrupt the speech process. Conversely, a listener focusing on function words would not be able to keep track of what is said.
Thanks to their semi-conscious nature, function words can tell us if someone is deceptive, who has higher status, whether a group is working well together, the quality of a relationship, how an individual perceives others, the emotional state of an individual and much, much more.
The Words We Use
More than five decades of deception research have not produced any reliable and universal body language signals, gestures or non-verbal behaviours equivalent to a Pinocchio’s nose. Anyone selling you a book on “how to spot a liar” is, well, not completely honest. The challenges are manifold, and contrary to popular belief people do not like to lie, especially when the stakes are high. We are told that deception is rampant and that humans lie anywhere from two to two hundred times each day. These are not the lies we are interested in; these lies are mostly white lies, like “of course, darling, you look wonderful in this dress” or minor deceptions like why we came late for work.
But when it comes to consequential lies, lies with emotional investment where something is at stake, people go to quite some length to avoid them. These lies are risky, stressful, potentially costly, difficult to maintain over time and cognitively demanding, as all the little details of a deception have to be remembered. Two popular techniques to circumvent outright lies are lying by omission (leaving out selected facts in an otherwise true story) and paltering (lying by telling the truth with the intent to deceive). These types of lies are very difficult to detect by means of non-verbal cues simply because the deceiver is avoiding the actual lie altogether and is only fabricating a small part of the story.
In these circumstances analysing the linguistic structure of what is said or written and the exact words used can provide cues of deception because liars must use specific grammatical devices when circumventing withheld information. The most common device for evading the truth is to create an information gap by using a text bridge that spans time. Constructing a text bridge to span an information gap is best visualized with an actual bridge spanning a river. The road leading to the river is the truth being told, the bridge hops over the deception and at the other end the road continues with the truth.
There are specific words to look out for when it comes to a text bridge, some of which are “then, so, while, after, before, since, when, until and later,” but they are context sensitive and only one linguistic device out of many available to a deceptive person.
To Talk Or Not To Talk
When popular and professional deception literature discusses verbal and nonverbal communication, the focus is often on the nonverbal aspect. The assumption is that nonverbal communication produces reliable deception cues because people cannot control their behaviour. That is a flawed argument in itself, because people can and do control their behaviour, at least to a certain extent. The greater misconception is thinking that people can control their verbal communication, their language.
People cannot control their language, not only because part of it is subconscious, but because of the incredible processing speed of the brain. To speak—that is, to translate a picture in your mind into a sentence—involves adherence to the correct rules of grammar; it involves syntax—that is, how you structure your sentence; it involves instant and precise word for word choice from a vocabulary of probably more than 100,000 words; and it involves the use of a myriad little function words that glue it all together. These function words are processed in a different part of the brain and largely evade conscious awareness, which is why they are interesting in the context of deception detection.
The processing speed required by the brain to do all that simultaneously is too fast for anyone to fully control their language. People may believe that they can control their language, but in reality they cannot. The only way to control language is simply not to talk—but then, sometimes silence speaks louder than words.
