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How to Spot a Liar

By: Gian Erguiza - February, 2008

Can you spot a liar? Do you know when you’re being lied to? Liars tend to stay calm and it’s up to you to fire them up to get the truth out. You must find ways to identify when someone is being untruthful in front of your face. The most common way to spot a liar without a lie detector is to watch their body language and listen for changes in the tone of their voice. Trust your instincts.

When someone is lying to you, your natural instincts start to tingle and your senses tell you that something is not right. Your gut feeling will tell you that something in the person’s word is not right which eventually indicates that you are dealing with a liar. There are other ways to help you spot a liar so the next time you get that feeling that someone’s jerking your chain, check for these:

Shifty Eyes. A liar will often not look you straight in the eye.
Liars can’t keep still. They fidget but they tend to move their arms, hand, fingers less and usually get a high pitched voice cause by the tension of the situation. You will notice that they’re trying to keep still and there ill be a lot of pauses in their speech. You’ll also notice that they’ll backtrack on some important details in which a person telling the truth will have less speech errors.
Nose scratching, tapping of fingers, fake coughs, playing with something on their fingers, tight jaw, looking up, sweating and heavy breathing are a good indicators of discomfort and deceit.
They tend to avoid details. Liars would rather stick to the bold facts instead of dwelling on the details. This hinders them from fumbling words, making speech errors, and basically, their speech patterns change.
Most liars will fake their sadness. If someone says their sad and their eyebrows don’t go up, they’re lying. Genuinely sad people get wrinkled foreheads from grief when they cry and the inner eyebrows go up.
If they ask you to repeat the question, they are lying.
If their facial expressions change real quickly, they’re lying. They might be experiencing fear or guilt at the time at fooling people.
When we smile, we don’t just move our mouth. Consequently, we also move the muscle on top of the brow. Liars just grin, moving only one muscle which is the mouth.
If they’re touching their face while they talk is a sign that they’re uncomfortable. The higher they touch the face, the worse the lie.
Liars will often attack or leave when they feel trapped when questioned rigorously. They will act angry and storm around to hide their anxiety.

The truth is, just say the truth. Make it less complicated for you and just come clean. Being a truthful person will make you a better person in the long run.

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