Dedicated to my wife Olga, without whom this book would never have been written.

I also want to say a huge thank you to Valery Korovin, Mikhail Pelekhaty, Tatyana Neverova, Alexander Lukin, Viktor Makarov, Anna Kovbas, Mikhail Baev for their help in writing and publishing this book.

Who is this book for and how to use it

We resort to lies all the time, for different reasons and in different situations. How many troubles and problems could have been avoided if we knew the true situation and were not misled! This book is one of the small attempts to do everything possible to make there less lies and deception in our lives, which means that someone becomes a little happier.

I have been involved in lie detection for more than 20 years, during which I have read many books on this topic and seen a huge number of specialists in this industry, both domestic and foreign. There have been many discoveries and disappointments along my path.

Those who have read “The Psychology of Lying” by P. Ekman will probably agree that his book consists of a set of articles united by one topic. And if you read it carefully, some definitions even seem strange. For example, the definition that sounds like “hot spots” - what are they? You can’t help but wonder what these “dots” are, how they “burn” and, most importantly, who set them on fire? It is clear that this is just a metaphor, but if we are talking about a scientific approach and epistemology, then behind the metaphor there must be a criterion-accurate descriptive process of phenomena and their systemic categorization and classification. What we clearly don’t see with Ekman. His great merit is that he was the first to draw attention to such a direction of social psychology and, maybe even anthropology, as psychology of lies, and the first to use face and emotions for detection. However, the series “Lie to Me” brought him popularity, and this is probably right: a unique person should remain in the history of the science of emotions, but the real names in real practical lie detection will remain not eminent laboratory scientists, but real practitioners like John Reid, James A . Matte and Nathan Gordon. They were the ones who, for the first time in a situation of real investigations and inspections, began to describe non-verbal signs (markers) of lies.

This book is one of the first and, I hope, not the last attempts to try to describe a systematic approach to non-instrumental lie detection. Written in fairly simple language, it is based on thousands of studies and real field experiments and a sample that any social psychologist or psychotherapist would envy, and most importantly, it is absolutely scientific. Theory and science are the concentrated and systematized experience of generations. Generations of polygraph examiners and verifiers work every day within the framework of non-instrumental lie detection, the foundations of which I would like to outline on the pages of this book.

Who will it benefit?

Psychologists and psychotherapists. The book will reveal the views of polygraph examiners and verifiers not only on the psychology of lying, but also on a number of psychotypes, will help to understand the motives of people’s behavior, find out where they tell the truth and where they lie, understand why they do this, and learn to help clients faster.

Polygraph specialists - in order to raise the level of their knowledge, obtain additional qualifications, increase their competitiveness in the market and learn new models of lie detection.

Lawyers and law enforcement officials. The book will tell you about ways to obtain truly reliable information from clients or opponents, which will help not only to be one step ahead, but also to more competently build a line of defense or attack in legal conflicts.

Business owners, negotiators, project managers. Detecting lies is one of the most powerful weapons in business. Agree that it is good to know what your employees, subordinates, business partners or contractors really think about you. The book will allow you to understand when your subordinates or bosses are being disingenuous, and will tell you that you can always use this to your advantage. This knowledge can save not only your time, but also a huge amount of money. After all, no one wants to make a deal with liars.

Recruitment specialists. The material presented in the book will make conducting interviews more technologically advanced and less energy-intensive. The book sets out a system of questions that are easy to ask - and you will immediately understand whether the applicant is telling the truth.

Middle managers/highly specialized experts with problems in their personal lives. Speculating on problems in your personal life is not very good, but if you really want to find out what your loved one or loved one thinks about you, then this book is one of the few ways to find out the truth. In addition, you can understand in a few seconds how promising a given conversation or new acquaintance is.

For everyone interested in psychology. If you are a fan of the series “Lie to Me”, “The Mentalist” and you are interested in the psychology of lying, then you know that in bookstores there are a lot of popular books on the topic of detecting lies, but not a single one that is truly literate. This book is the first professional approach to the theory of lie detection.

Thus, I present to you a kind of tutorial on toolless lie detection. The material presented in this book allows you to use it as a practical tutorial on lie detection. It contains not only advice, but also practical tasks for independently developing skills. If the dear reader completes at least some of these tasks and exercises, he will be able to understand lies much better.

Introduction

Because of lies, the person that he was disappears, destroying his pride and his dignity.

Without lies, a person will die of despair and boredom.


I've been doing lie detection for a long time. Working in this area allowed me to draw attention to the fact that the number of people who condemn lies, calling it one of the most terrible human inventions, is enormous. It is possible that it is lies that lead people to various unpleasant situations and entail catastrophic consequences. Many philosophers since ancient times have argued that lying is dangerous, it breeds distrust and contempt for the liar. The word “lie” itself is negative. When we utter the phrase “You lied,” we not only give a negative characterization of our opponent’s speech behavior, but thereby even humiliate him. The book of books, the Bible, teaches us that lies led man to the fall. Pay attention to how interesting our brain is: the liars in our minds are always someone else, that is, not you and me. Here the question naturally arises: can we say with confidence that this is so, or does it make sense to understand more deeply this phenomenon that surrounds a person throughout his entire life?

American psychologist Bella de Paulo conducted an experiment that consisted of the following: she asked 147 people to keep a diary in which the subjects had to describe every case when they had to mislead someone, that is, tell a lie. The results of this study showed that, at a conservative estimate, people who took part in this experiment deviated from the truth on average 1.5 times per day.

Another researcher, American scientist at the University of Massachusetts Robert Feldman, calculated that people at the first stage of acquaintance manage to embellish something in their speech three times in 10 minutes of conversation. It is this experiment that the character of the series “Lie to Me”, the famous professor and specialist in the field of lie detection Call Lightman, refers to when he tells the terrorist that on average people lie three times in 10 minutes of conversation.

Remember how many times we did this, for example, when we looked at a child and said: “What a beautiful baby!”, and at that moment we ourselves thought: “This is an alien!” or “He’s so scary!” What are the reasons for this behavior? Why does humanity always tell lies?

Mark Twain said that everyone lies, every day and every hour: in their sleep, in reality, in their dreams, in moments of joy and even in moments of sorrow. Is lying so bad if we constantly use it? If we look at deception from a different point of view and pay attention to the fact that people are constantly lying, then lying may turn out to be a phenomenon that is not only not so disgusting to our nature as we want to imagine, but is actually the essence of man.


Let's turn to the Bible. One day Eve said the following phrase: “The serpent tempted me, and I ate the forbidden fruit.” We see that while still in the Garden of Eden, Eve lied. Can we then say that the first deceiver is the woman? Or is the tempter to blame for everything? Then the snake should be called the inventor of lies. If we carefully analyze the text and remember the events that took place in Eden, the following will emerge in our minds: God tells Adam and Eve that they will die on the day they break the ban and try the apple. What's next? They ignored the ban, but did not fall dead. Perhaps lying is not a terrible act. If the Lord God himself cannot do without sometimes deviating from the truth, then can mere mortals like you and me live without lies? What would our world be like if we always told the truth? I suggest looking for answers to these and other questions.

Part 1. What is a lie

From this part of the book you will learn what humanity owes to deception, how our brain reacts to lies and lies; We will define deception and consider the main signs and strategies of lying.


Chapter 1. What humanity owes to deception

Some scientists (mostly evolutionists, largely based on the hypotheses of K. Marx and F. Engels) believe that man began to separate from the monkey by picking up a stone and a stick. In their opinion, the manufacture of tools, that is, attempts to use familiar objects of the surrounding world for new purposes, allowed man to become Homo sapiens. Interesting hypothesis.

The human brain is an amazing creation of evolution and probably the most mysterious. It is certainly difficult to explain why our brains are larger than those of apes, given that our DNA is 98% similar. It is impossible to deny the fact that in our development we have left primates far behind. For some unknown reason, 1.5 or 2 million years ago, the brains of our ancestors began to grow at a fairly decent rate. If we look at people today, we will notice that our grandchildren are many times superior to us in development and understanding, for example, of modern technology. The human brain absorbs 1/5 of all the energy we consume, although its mass is relatively small. Accordingly, a person requires more food to recuperate, which implies an increase in risk. The above factors allow us to say: our mind is a dangerous luxury.

Let us ask ourselves again, are the classics of Marxism right when they say that it was labor that separated man from the ape? Is it really?

In 1976, analytical psychologist and professor at the London School of Economics Nicholas Humphrey wrote an article “The Social Functions of Intelligence,” in which he questioned traditional ideas about the development of human intelligence due to the fact that our ancestor picked up a stick and began to use it for another purpose. According to N. Humphrey, it is almost impossible to believe that the reason for the development of human intelligence was solely the problem of survival and making fire allowed our brain to develop.

It is obvious that the manufacture of even simple tools, as well as the habit of climbing a tree when a predator appears, require a certain level of development, but this action does not require any special ingenuity, since it is a behavior learned by man during the constant process of evolution of the entire animal world .

What was the catalyst for brain development in this case? N. Humphrey introduces the concept of creative intelligence, meaning by it the ability to foresee events, rationalize one’s judgments, that is, a person learns to predict events before they happen, and create new models of behavior. N. Humphrey believes that foresight grows out of problems associated with social life during the Paleolithic period. The groups in which people and their immediate ancestors lived, in contrast to the group of ordinary primates, were much larger and more complex in structure, which, on the one hand, ensured greater security and cohesion, and on the other, gave rise to a spirit of competition. Each member of a primitive community was forced to rely on his fellow tribesmen in order to survive and thrive, but at the same time he had to know how to outsmart them or at least avoid someone getting ahead of him in the struggle for food or possession of a female. male

In such a situation, survival became akin to a competition of tactics in which people had to think several steps ahead and at the same time remember everything that had already happened. As a result, you had to have a good memory to remember who did what to you this morning or last week, who is your friend and who is your enemy. This context implied the need to think about the consequences of your behavior and analyze what might happen to you in the future. Everything had to be done in a continuously changing situation, to which such a concept as entropy, that is, uncertainty, could be applied. In the tribe, the question always arose whether you would wake up in the morning or not, whether you would be able to eat something or whether it would be eaten by a predator, and if not a predator, then a relative.

N. Humphrey's assumptions are based on the fact that social life requires much more sophistication than ordinary adaptation. Agree that the trees do not move, the stones do not conspire to take away your food. When our ancestors came out of the forests onto the open plain and began to engage in gathering, the skills of their social life combined with the complex tasks that were posed to people by the new habitat, and therefore they could only count on further intellectual development. This is how Homo sapiens was born. I wonder when Homo sapiens will turn into Homo spiritus. Man has become rational, but will he become a spiritual or soulful man?

For a long time, N. Humphrey's hypothesis of social intelligence was just a controversial theory that no one tried to prove, because there was a familiar picture of the world that gave a clear explanation of how man stood out from the world of primates. This continued until 1980. It was then that Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten, young anthropologists from Scotland's St. Engels University, decided to study the social intelligence hypothesis in more detail. They wanted to achieve authority in the scientific community, so their goal was to refute or prove N. Humphrey's hypothesis. Scientists have focused on such an important aspect of social behavior as survival. R. Bern and E. Whiten studied various manifestations of cunning in the habits of chimpanzees. Observations of the behavior of young female chimpanzees led the researchers to suggest that the social intelligence hypothesis has real basis. R. Byrne and E. Whiten, studying the behavior of primates, especially large ones such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, found that they were excellent deceivers, and this led scientists to think about the theory of evolution of Homo sapiens. R. Berne and E. Whiten suggested that in conditions of a primitive communal system a person has a greater chance of survival, the better he is able to predict the consequences of his behavior. Consequently, the one who learned well how to deceive his relatives had reproductive advantages, since he was the first in everything, including in the struggle for food as the main condition for survival. Please note that this statement applies equally to those who learned to recognize lies because they were prepared for the main thing - not to be deceived. Psychologist David Lingston Smith puts it this way: “In a world full of deception, it would be nice to have a lie detector in our heads.”

The social intelligence hypothesis suggests that the human brain will continue to evolve because as humanity as a whole evolves, we become more adept at deception and, paradoxically, at detecting lies. Homo sapiens will continue to evolve towards improved memory and careful planning of their actions. Perhaps a person will succeed in thinking about who, what, how and for what reasons will do it in the future. As we see, there are prerequisites for this.

The study of deception among apes led R. Berne and E. Whiten to create a new work in 1988, namely “Machiavellian Intelligence”. They collected all the examples of deception that they could find and defined them as mimicry, pretense, concealment, and distraction. But the main merit of this book is not in the classification of methods of lying, but in the proof that the minds of people have developed through social intrigue, deception and insidious cooperation. These ideas are widely accepted not only in the theory of evolution, but also in many other social sciences, in particular psychology, social psychology and economics.

R. Byrne and E. Whiten made convincing arguments confirming the existence of a connection between intelligence and the tendency to deceive, supported by real-life examples, but they did not have serious evidence. Liverpool University anthropologist Robin Dunbar helped them overcome this disadvantage.

Also based on N. Humphrey's theory of social intelligence, R. Dunbar drew attention to the fact that although all primates have fairly large brains in relation to body size, the brains of baboons living in large groups are much better developed than the brains of monkeys living in smaller groups. This circumstance made the scientist think about the possible relationship between brain size and the complexity of relationships in a group. R. Dunbar found that if a group consists of five individuals, then in order to successfully exist in it, it is necessary to keep in memory 10 different interactions of intra-group relations, that is, it is important to know who is related to whom, who is worthy of attention, who - No. If the group grows to 20 members, then there are 192 interactions to monitor: 19 of them will directly concern one member of the group, and another 173 will concern the rest. As you can see, the size of the group increased only four times, while the number of relationships, and therefore the intellectual level, increased 20 times.

To visually compare the size of an animal's brain with the size of the group in which it lives, R. Dunbar began collecting information about primates around the world. As a basis for his research, he took the size of the outer layer of the brain - the neocortex, which is sometimes referred to as the thinking part of the brain because it is responsible for abstract thinking and long-term planning reflection. According to N. Humphrey, it was these qualities that were necessary in order to cope with the whirlpool of events in social life. This circumstance proves the fact that the outer layer of the brain is most actively developed in primates, therefore, it can be assumed that this statement will be true in relation to primitive people who existed 2 million years ago.

The connection discovered by R. Dunbar turned out to be so strong that he could determine with amazing accuracy the size of a group, flock, or colony of animals, having only information about the typical volume of the neocortex for them. He even tried to calculate this value for people, since the size of the human brain makes it possible to determine an acceptable social group for us, that is, those people with whom we would be pleased to meet in the morning over a cup of coffee, for example. According to R. Dunbar, such a group can reach approximately 150 people. Soon after he arrived at this result, he read in anthropology books that the arithmetic mean for many social groups from the time of a society based on gathering, to the units of a modern army or the maximum number of employees in a department of a large company, is precisely number 150.

Subsequently, scientists, based on the works of R. Dunbar, R. Byrne and E. Whiten, found that the frequency of deception among members of the species is directly proportional to the size of the neocortex. R. Berne and E. Whiten did not try to measure the drive to deceive in the animal with the largest neocortex, that is, Homo sapiens, probably because there is not the slightest doubt that this species ranks first in the competition of natural liars.

There is no end to the debate about lies. “Lies are an absolute evil and our curse,” writes the 16th-century philosopher. Michel de Montaigne. “If we can only appreciate the severity and danger, we will surely understand that a deceiver deserves to be burned at the stake more than a person who has committed another crime,” he says. Since the time of Augustine, philosophers have categorically argued that lying is the most terrible sin. Immanuel Kant was simply sure that there is no greater stupidity than the so-called white lie, since no lie can be justified under any circumstances. However, there were other scientists, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that there is only one world, and it is full of falsehood, cruelty, contradictions, lies and insensitivity. People need deception to conquer this reality, since the whole truth is that lies are necessary for survival.

There are many forms of lies. The content of these disputes can be absolutely anything. And all of them are reflections on what kind of creatures we are, on what it means to be a good person and what it means to be a bad person. Georg Steiner, literary critic and philosopher, wrote: “People’s taste for lies is indispensable for the balance of human consciousness and development.” Let's accept the fact that we are all born liars and recognize that lying is a unique phenomenon that provides a survival mechanism.

What, then, will we study on the pages of our book?

The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr said that there are two types of truth: trivial and deep. In his opinion, the opposite of trivial truth is a lie, and the opposite of deep truth is also truth. You and I will not study deep truths and look at various phenomena from their point of view. We will not highlight such forms of deception as stories, fiction or fantasies. Classifications are of course important, but this matters for scientists who are engaged in theoretical and philosophical or theosophical research.

This book is absolutely practical in nature, and its purpose is to give you the tools to find out the motives of your interlocutor’s behavior. You must know for sure whether your opponent is telling the truth or deceiving you.