Snap. Patti Wood
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in the situation. Whether you’re a salesperson, teacher, parent, or manager, what you really want comes out. Do you want to manipulate someone, or do you want to help? Do you want to appear trustworthy and sympathetic, or just look that way while someone is watching?
“Feel, show, say.” When someone is being honest, he might sound more melodic and his movements, voice, and words will seem to flow smoothly. Someone who is lying thinks about the information he wants to hide. He thinks of the words he wants to say in the lie, and he may say the words super quickly before he forgets them. He has to think about how to transmit what he should be feeling, which results in awkward, oddly timed verbal and nonverbal messages. You have heard, seen, and felt it when someone says, “It is a pleasure to meet you,” but takes a long pause before actually looking at you and smiling, and then lets the smile linger too long. When you listen to or watch someone lie, this lack of synchronicity between the verbal and nonverbal messages alerts the central nervous system and creates a stress response. You can see how important it is to get an accurate impression of someone you’re listening to, and being in the presence of someone who is lying is stressful.
A Person’s Stress May Be Visible in a Snap
A stressed-out person may do one of the following:
Freeze: Freeze in place for a moment.
Flight: Move or position all or parts of her body to flee, or try to make her body smaller to create a smaller area for attack.
Fight: Position her body to fight by getting bigger, placing her feet farther apart, moving her arms up, or putting her elbows out.
Faint: The blood can flow away from the surface of the skin.
When someone feels guilty or fears being caught in a lie, he might freeze in place like a teenager caught by his parents in the part of his story he didn’t rehearse. He might wear the famous frozen, deer-in-the-headlights look that Tiger Woods exhibited at the beginning of his apology statement. Freezing gives us time to decide what to do next. The liar might flee, so he may give nonverbal signals of leave-taking by pointing his feet toward the door, tucking his feet under a chair, or pointing his lower body away from the person or people he is with. He might place his feet far apart in what I call the “lock-and-load” position, or place his hand or hands on his hip(s). These moves make him appear bigger and more threatening, and they signal that a person is ready for a fight. Or he might suddenly lose the color in his face as the blood rushes away from the surface of the skin, leaving him looking like he might pass out at any moment.
Lies that are planned in advance can sound credible, but there’s apt to be “nonverbal leakage.” Liars expend so much effort trying to remember the lies they made up that they give out more cues, from eyeblinks to foot pointing, called “leakage,” than do spontaneous liars.
In order to most clearly read deceit, you need to know the person’s normal baseline behavior. This might be tough to recognize if you are reading someone you just met, but there are tools that make it easier. For example, notice whether the speaker is pausing. Some people talk fast and loud, and some people talk slowly with lots of pauses. Liars tend to go to the extremes of their normal behavior patterns with regard to expressiveness and pausing. Extroverts tend to be more expressive when lying — raising their voices, laughing, cracking jokes, changing the subject, or getting in fights. Strong emotions such as humor and laughter provide great cover behaviors to hide liars’ nervousness. Introverts, on the other hand, become more introverted. They might freeze up, slow down, get quieter, make less eye contact, or become wooden, giving their voices less vocal variation. As you might guess, this means we are more likely to recognize when introverts are lying. It is easier for extroverts to charm us into thinking they are telling the truth when they cover their lies by being more bombastic.
The Lock-and-Load Power Position
Notice whenever anyone makes you lock and load your stance, planting your legs far apart, or if anyone locks and loads as you talk to them.
The Timing Is Telling
A sports star accused of wrongdoing holds a press conference to deny the charges. He clears his throat and begins speaking; it’s a simple case of nervousness, perhaps. But listen closely as he continues to speak. Is his throat clearing a baseline behavior, or does he do it only when he makes certain statements? Notice the timing. Does his voice go up in pitch, and does he clear his throat or cough after he says, “I am innocent”? And does he clear his throat again after bringing his voice down almost to a whisper and saying, “I did nothing wrong”?
Feel It First
Depending on how you define the term muscle, there are about six hundred to eight hundred muscles in the human body. It’s impossible to consciously manage or control them all. What’s more, if you do work to control your body’s language, your subconscious will simultaneously continue to send its own messages.
Remember, when someone is being honest, she feels something first, then shows and says what she feels. A deceiver, especially if she has time to prepare her deception, is thinking of her story and the words she needs to say. But there are so many muscles in the face that you can’t control all of them when you’re under stress. It’s difficult for a person to avoid sending a constant stream of signals about what she is really feeling and thinking.
If you try too hard to control your body, you’ll likely send mixed messages. One part of you will say one thing, while another will say something else, and the result will be that people trust you less, not more.
Morgan is a petite, shapely blonde who doesn’t lack for men coming up to her and flirting. Her complaint is that these encounters never end in the men requesting a date. She is highly successful in her business, but in social settings, she says, “I smile, laugh, and do all the things that should work, but they still end up walking away.”
One evening, I go out with her, not as her wing woman, but as her barstool coach, to watch her interactions from a discreet distance, hidden from her view. I notice that the men are picking up on her tension. Morgan smiles and laughs, but her smile lingers longer than it should, and her laugh is a bit brittle and forced. She radiates tension. Even her shoulders and eyebrows are noticeably raised, as if she is afraid. Her voice is high and strident, and her hands occasionally rise up and push out, as if she is stopping traffic. She is pushing the guys away!
The men sense her fear, and I can even see some of them try to be less assertive by taking up less space and tilting their heads to put her at ease, but she is unwittingly making them uncomfortable. Morgan has a lot going for her, but it is undercut by the discomfort she evokes in others. When we talk, she is not surprised by my observations. “I wasn’t doing any of these things simply because a body language expert was watching me. I have always felt nervous while flirting, and I just thought my bravado masked it!”
We addressed her fear, working “from the outside in,” deciding what she could do differently. We worked on changing her stance and gestures, relaxing and lowering her voice and shoulders, and calming her tension. We even changed her breathing so she was able to breathe deep in her lower abdomen and feel more relaxed. She ended up getting dates, including a very special one with the man who is now her boyfriend.
Likability
Sharon and Scott opened their door to greet their friend Spencer and his new wife, Debbie. Debbie came in with shiny eyes, her arms up and open, and her head tilted, exposing her throat. Her palms were showing, and she greeted her hosts with a warm, melodious voice. Though Sharon had never met Debbie, her guest’s greeting was so warm and gregarious that she won her over immediately. An hour later, after dinner, Sharon remarked to Debbie, “I feel like I’ve known you for years!”
When a person demonstrates likability, she smiles and laughs easily and uses friendly upper-body language. She shows emotions and facial expressions that allow us to know how she’s feeling. The opposite of likability is a lack of expression and affect, and, often, a monotonous voice. Research shows that the more expressive someone is, the more comfortable we are with her.
Why We Love Extroverts