Can You Tell When Someone Is Lying?
People often say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. They’re also the door to the truth.
People talk to each other everyday without saying a word. A massive amount of information is exchanged between people just with body language. Some people are experts at reading body language, and often they don’t even know it. They just get a feeling about someone that might be good or bad.
There are a lot of different body gestures that say a lot. For example, when someone crosses their arms or their legs, that’s called a barrier or a block. It’s a sign that they feel uncomfortable or have something to hide. It’s a defensive mechanism and people do it automatically without even thinking about it. The eyes are very special because, how people move their eyes will give off subtle clues as to which part of their brains they are accessing information from. Knowing that, you can often tell whether they are lying by how they move their eyes in response to a question.
Which smileys in the picture do you think are lying? Can you spot them? Can you tell who’s telling the truth? Read on. The answers are further down.
People can also put up a block with their eyes. One of the ways they do this is by constricting their pupils (making them smaller). This is an unconscious thing that you can’t really control “pupil watching” is practiced by all sorts of people from poker players to business negotiators. It’s one of the reasons that poker players like to wear sunglasses. When a person’s pupils are large (dilated) they’re being more open, and it’s likely that they are telling the truth.
When you look someone straight in the eyes, it’s very intimate. It could just be a friendly gaze or it could mean a heart pounding va-va-va-voom! Looking over someones eyes to the center of their forehead is a commanding or domineering type of stare. This is used in business a lot as well. It’s when someone seems to be looking right through you instead of at you. Tall people do it well.
So which smileys are lying?
- Liar! … maybe. If you ask someone to picture something in their heads, their eyes will often go up and to their right side, and there’s nothing untruthful about that. But when answering factual questions, usually this is where they look when they’re constructing some kind of excuse. So it really depends on the question you’re asking them.
- The remembering look. Up and to their left. This is one of the most honest looks. It means the person is checking through their memory to find the information to answer your question.
- There are a lot of clues that you have to look at when someone looks staight at you. What’s their overall expression? Are they fidgeting? Is it an intimate gaze or a commanding one? Are their pupils dilated? The only thing for sure is that looking straight at someone is very powerful, so they’re either really, really telling the truth or really, really lying big!
- When someone looks down and to their right, they’re remembering a feeling. Not just a visual picture but an experience that might involve sights, smells, sounds, what it’s like to touch something or hold it. It could be a very richly textured memory or the person could be imagining what an experience might be like. It usually signals the truth because it’s not the type of eye movement that’s really associated questions. But a crafty person telling a long story could be remembering an experience in order to alter some of the details that make them guilty.
- If you like talking to yourself inside your head then you probably look down and to the left a fair amount. This signals a mental conversation going on inside someone’s head. They might be trying to figure out what to tell you and what not to say. This is where you need to be an experienced interrogator to get the truth out of them before their eyes start going all over the place!
Did you guess right? Okay, it’s not exactly an easy science and it depends on a lot of other things that are going on and what type of questions a person is asked. But it’s very real science. It works. It just takes a lot of training and practice. You might know when someone is lying intuitively. Part of that intuition is because your brain recognizes these eye signals and can figure them out, even if you don’t know what they all mean exactly.
