Honesty is especially important in the workplace. It helps build trust and foster collaborative relationships. If your coworkers are dishonest or otherwise try to sabotage your job by withholding information, it can quickly change an office environment from harmonious to rigid.
When you work with a habitual liar, it makes it your job that much more difficult and puts you on edge. What’s more, habitual liars are often desensitized to lying, according to a study in Nature Neuroscience. This means that they feel less guilt and may be harder to spot.
So how can you tell when someone is lying and what can you do about it? First, it’s essential to establish a baseline. That is, you must understand how someone typically acts when they are telling the truth. What’s their body language link? How about their tone of voice? Do they have certain habits?
Once you’ve determined this, it’s easier to pick out abnormal behaviors, though lying presents itself differently in everyone. This is especially true when you examine the lying habits of certain personalities and genders. For example, creatives have been found to be good liars because they are better at rationalizing dishonesty. Women typically tell more kind-hearted lies, men tell more self-serving lies, and extroverts lie more than introverts.
When trying to spot a liar, you should be aware of both their body language and their verbal cues. Don’t be fooled — fidgeting and lack of eye contact are not sure signs that someone is lying. Instead look for things like fake smiling, dilated pupils, and stiffness. Also be wary of someone who over-explains or uses the third person to try to remove themselves from the lie.
To help you learn how to spot a liar, GetVoip compiled these verbal and nonverbal signs of lying based on data from scientists and psychologists, as well as tactics you can use to discourage lying.
Though you probably can’t break a liar’s habits, there are subtle ways that you can dissuade them from lying. For example, frequent liars often think that they can get away with their lies without anyone noticing. If you gently and subtly expose their lies, they realize that they’re not as sneaky as they think.
For more tips on how to spot a liar, check out the infographic below created by GetVoIP!
