Oscar Emmanuel Ogbonnaya

HOW TO SPOT A LIAR

HOW TO SPOT A LIAR "Sorry, my phone died." "It's nothing. I'm fine." "These allegations are completely unfounded." "The company was not aware of any wrongdoing." "I love you." We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day, and we spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect them, from medieval torture devices to polygraphs, blood-pressure and breathing monitors, voice-stress analyzers, eye trackers, infrared brain scanners, and even the 400-pound electroencephalogram. But although such tools have worked under certain circumstances, most can be fooled with enough preparation, and none are considered reliable enough to even be admissible in court. But, what if the problem is not with the techniques, but the underlying assumption that lying spurs physiological changes? What if we took a more direct approach, using communication science to analyze the lies themselves?