Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. Have you ever been burned by somebody because they told you an outright lie? It can happen to your personal or business life. You’re on cloud nine, your girlfriend tells you she loves you only to find out later she’s been cheating on you for months. Client says their business is solvent, but they end up bankrupt and you lose a ton of money on the account. Wouldn’t it be great to avoid these situations by being able to tell right then and there if someone is lying to you? Well, my guest today has spent his career in the CIA sussing out deceptive behavior and developed a system to help other agents know when someone is lying or telling the truth. His name is Michael Floyd, and besides being a former CIA agent, he’s also co-author of the book Spy the Lie.
On today’s show, Michael dispels some myths about lie detection, like for example, there’s really no such thing as lie detection. Rather, Michael argues you should focus on behavioral and verbal cues that suggest someone is deceiving you. And when you see those cues to investigate further, he then walks us through the system he used during his career as a CIA agent and now as a corporate consultant to flush out liars. After the show is over, check out the show notes at aom.is/spythelie. Michael Floyd, welcome to the show.
Michael Floyd:
Well, thank you, Brett. It’s good to be here.
Brett McKay:
So you wrote a book along with your co-authors called Spy the Lie. It’s about kind of debunking some of the myths about lie detection and we’ll get into that a little bit. But before we do, your background’s really interesting. What’s your background that led you to write this book about how to figure out if someone’s lying to you?
Michael Floyd:
Well, it goes back to 1972, straight out of college, undergraduate school. I went into the Army military police. I went through officer basic training in Fort Gordon, Georgia where the original government polygraph school was. And that piqued my interest. When I got out of the military, I ended up in Chicago at a company called John Reed and Associates to get my master of science degree in detection of deception. When I graduated, they invited me to join the staff. I was with them for six years and then was ultimately recruited to the CIA doing similar work and then on to NSA, the National Security Agency. And I left the government in 1989 to go to law school. And then out of law school in 1992, I started a polygraph business with an office in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Did that for 10 years and then reunited with a very good friend from CIA, a guy by the name of Phil Houston, a co-author of our book Spy the Lie.
And we are now on our second business entity called QVerity. And so we are still in the world of collecting information for clients.
Brett McKay:
And so is QVerity similar to what you’ve done before deception detection?
Michael Floyd:
Yes. Yes. QVerity is a company that uses this proven information gathering methodologies that we developed within the US intelligence community now for commercial applications.
Brett McKay:
Okay. Well, let’s talk about this idea of deception detection or being a human lie detector. Is there such a thing as being a human lie detector?
Michael Floyd:
Unfortunately there’s not, but we feel that our methodology certainly is the best out there for doing this. But the reason there’s really no such thing as a human lie detector is we’re not mind readers. So our methodology is designed to uncover what we call clusters of behavior. And I can get into that a little more deeply later, but when we interview somebody and we identify these clusters of what we think are deceptive behaviors, it’s incumbent upon us as interviewers to drill down, ask follow up questions to see if we can get at the reason for the concern that the person’s exhibiting through the behaviors we’re assessing.
Brett McKay:
And I think it’s also important to note, as you highlight in the book, that polygraph tests aren’t really lie detection tests. They give you information that allows the polygraph examiner to say follow up on this, but they don’t actually detect lies.
Michael Floyd:
That’s exactly right. It’s more of a think machine.
Brett McKay:
Why is it so hard to know if someone’s lying? I mean, what are some of the biases that we have? I mean, obviously we can’t read people’s mind, that’s the big thing, but what are some other factors that cause us to be deceived?
Michael Floyd:
Well, this really gets into the model itself, what we call the model that was developed. The primary developer of this was Phil Houston at the agency. It’s all predicated on cause and effect. If we don’t know the cause of the behavior, we simply can’t assess it. We’re trying to get people out of the world of speculation, of guessing, gut instincts, having a hunch and using a codified model with two rules. First rule is the timing rule, which says that the first deceptive indicator must occur within the first five seconds of the stimulus. And the stimulus in our world is the question. And so we want to make sure that if we are seeing deceptive behavior, it’s because of our question and not some unrelated thing. So it’s cause and effect is really what we’re looking for, for the deceptive behaviors.
Brett McKay:
Gotcha. And I mean, so there’s timing and clusters. We’ll get into that a little bit, like some of the behavior things we should be looking for. But another important factor or principle in this system you guys have developed is you guys said that in order to spy the lie, you have to ignore truthful behavior, which seems sort of counterintuitive. Can you explain that a little bit? Why you have to ignore the truth in order to spy the lie?
Michael Floyd:
Well, to be effective at detecting deception, obviously you first have to understand what deception looks and sounds like and then have a systematic and objective approach so that your attention is focused exactly where it needs to be focused. And back in the day when I was trained, we were taught to look for both truthful and untruthful behavior. And then almost as a scale of justice weigh does the truthful behavior outweigh the untruthful behavior? And if so, we would arrive at an opinion of no deception indicated. But what we discovered, what Phil discovered was that truthful behavior is easily imitated and replicated. If you were accused of doing a bad thing and wanted to be successful in deceiving the interviewer about your involvement, you think about the kinds of behaviors that you think somebody might be paying attention to, things like good eye contact, sitting with an open posture, being friendly, developing some rapport with the interviewer, just generally appearing to be very cooperative.
These are things that can easily be imitated and replicated. It’s not rocket science to give people good eye contact and sit with an open posture. And so it’s easy for someone to present truthful behavior, even though they’re not telling the truth. Another danger is what we call the halo effect. People don’t necessarily lie to all the questions. They may tell the truth to easily verifiable information and then lull us into thinking, well, if they’re telling the truth about the things that we know are truthful, therefore they must be telling the truth about everything else. So that’s another reason. And then also a bias element creeps into this truthful behavior process. We will, as interviewers, often we will see what we want or expect to see. So if we go into that interview believing that the person’s probably going to be telling us the truth, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where we’re now seeing truthful behavior, which leads us to believe that the person must be truthful.
So what we do is we just simply ignore truthful behavior. And by doing that, it really cuts our workload in half as interviewers. So now all we have to do is look and listen for deceptive indicators and tune out this whole process of looking for truthful behavior. And so it makes the detection of deception process much more streamlined and much more focused. If you think about going to a doctor for your annual physical, the doctor gives you a series of diagnostic tests. And if those diagnostic tests come back without any indicators of ill health, the doctor infers from the absence of those negative health symptoms that you are in good health. Our detection of deception model follows the same medical model in that as we probe with our surgically designed questions during an interview, if there is an absence of deceptive indicators, we infer truthfulness from the absence of deceptive indicators. I don’t know if this is making any sense to you or not.
Brett McKay:
No, it makes perfect sense.
Michael Floyd:
But that’s exactly how we do it. So if there’s an absence of deceptive indicators, an absence of what we call clusters of deceptive indicators, we infer from that truthfulness.
Brett McKay:
So as this cuts down on your bandwidth, you’re only focusing on deception. I’m sure it does take a bit of time to get over that bias of looking at the truth and just ignoring it.
Michael Floyd:
It does. And in our training, in fact, in the book Spy the Lie, we talk about the obstacles in detecting deception. And one of the major obstacles is what we call this tendency to believe. We’re all guilty of it. It’s just endemic in our society. It’s the way we’ve been raised to see the best in people, to accept things at face value. You’re innocent until proven guilty. And so as an interviewer, if you go into the interview with that tendency to believe mindset, the deceptive person will use this as a weapon against us and they’ll take advantage. So we encourage people to go into the interview, not with cynicism, but rather what we would call professional skepticism where we’re not necessarily accepting things at face value. It’s a much more clinical, objective, systematic approach to that interview setting.
Brett McKay:
So you mentioned earlier that we’re looking for timing and clusters. Timing is if there’s any indicator after the stimulus, which is your question within five seconds of asking that, then there’s clusters. We’ll talk about some of the different clusters or some of the different types of behavior, but how many of these different behaviors or ticks that you see should be near each other for you to say, “Yeah, he’s probably lying to us.” As opposed to if there’s just one or two, you think, “Well, maybe he’s not lying to us.” Is there like a, I don’t know what’s the word I’m looking for, a minimum amount of behaviors you need to see before you say that’s a cluster?
Michael Floyd:
Exactly. The cluster rule says that we have to have a minimum of two deceptive indicators in response to that single question. So if you think of an interview as a Q&A, you go from one question to the next question and so on. Each question and answer is a separate mini examination, if you will. These deceptive indicators are not cumulative from one question to the next. So I ask you a question, “Where were you last night?” And in that response, I see two or more deceptive indicators, and this can be a combination of both verbal and nonverbal indicators. In response to that question, I infer from that. I infer from the two or more deceptive indicators in your response that you have a problem with that question. Now, this is why we’re not human lie detectors. I can’t read your mind, but I do know from your bad behavior that that question has stimulated concern or that you have concern or uncertainty in that information you just provided to me.
Now it could be that you’re just flat out lying to me and that’s why I saw those indicators, but it could also mean that you have a problem. You may lack confidence in what information you just provided or you may be uncertain about the information you just provided. So what I do then is I typically will follow up with another question and drill down to see, does that concern go away? Does your answer, does your response make sense? Or as I continue to probe and drill down, do those clusters of deceptive behavior remain? And the more I ask you about this, the worse your behavior becomes. And now I know I’m probably onto something quite significant. So we use this model really, think of it as a compass that guides us through that interview process. It leads the way or a Geiger counter or mining for nuggets of information.
And so as I probe with my questions and observe behaviors, the interview now becomes a very dynamic process. Rather than just a list of prepared questions, the interview now goes where your behavior goes. So it’s not just a list of questions. It’s a very dynamic think on your feet process that I’m guided by behaviors I’m getting from you.
Brett McKay:
So this sounds like it’s hard because on the one hand you have to ignore truth, but then also you have to both watch and listen to deception at the same time. And that’s hard. So how do you do that? How do you both observe for deceptive behavior and listen for deceptive communication?
Michael Floyd:
Well, it’s difficult. It takes awareness. It takes training. It takes experience and a great deal of focus and concentration during the interview. Our brains have a dominance. The brain wants to either be in auditory mode or visual mode. If our brain is in auditory mode and we’re simply listening for deceptive verbal indicators, we’re very likely to miss deceptive nonverbal indicators. If our dominance is visual, then we’re going to be, of course, catching the deceptive nonverbal indicators, but now missing the deceptive verbal indicators. So we call this process L-squared mode, where we train our brain to fight that dominance of either visual or auditory and try to both look and listen for deceptive indicators at the same time. And it’s easier said than done. So people can actually practice this simply watching investigative news shows or when they see a celebrity, a politician, someone in the news who’s been accused of doing something wrong, being asked questions about that, go into L-squared mode and both look and listen for deceptive verbal and non-verbal indicators. And the more you do it, the better you get.
Brett McKay:
Well, there’s a lot of that going on right now, so lots of opportunities to practice, I guess.
Michael Floyd:
Yes, there are.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Let’s talk about verbal communication, deceptive verbal communication. What are some verbal cues that indicate that someone might be lying? So we’re focused in on their words. What are some things that people say that often tell that there might be deceiving you?
Michael Floyd:
Well, something you might find interesting, Brett, since we published that book, Spy the Lie, we have now, when we do our live training, we have taken the deceptive verbal and non-verbal indicators and actually put these now into what we call five distinct psychological buckets. It’s much easier for people to remember the behaviors and also understand the behaviors because they now know the psychology behind the deceptive indicators that they’re both hearing and observing. So the five buckets, well, the first four buckets really encompass the deceptive verbal indicators. And then the last psychological bucket encapsulates what we would call the deceptive non-verbal indicators. So if I may, let me just give you the first four psychological verbal buckets. The first bucket is what we call evasion. These would be the evasion deceptive indicators. Think of the evasion behaviors as linguistic acts of concealment. An example of the evasion bucket would be failure to answer the question or failure to deny a question.
With truthful people, the facts are the ally. The facts are their friend. The facts make them feel comfortable. They’re not afraid to touch, talk about the facts. So if you’re telling the truth, your first mission really is to deliver that message to the person who’s answering or who’s asking you the questions because the facts help you. So you’re eager to get that out. On the other hand, if you’re not telling the truth, the tendency is to evade and not answer questions or not deny. And so that’s why we then see those behaviors in the evasion buckets.
Brett McKay:
So let’s get into that non-verbal bucket. What’s that?
Michael Floyd:
We call those the reaction behaviors. These reaction behaviors are triggered by the autonomic nervous system. When your question creates a spike of anxiety, it’s a fight flight thing that we’ve all studied in school, that anxiety has to leak out. It has to go somewhere because I know there are consequences associated with my lie being detected that makes me feel anxious. And so the anxiety leaks out through this uncontrolled body language, things like hand to face activity, grooming gestures, what we call anchor point movements, the shifting in the chair, the bobbing of a foot, curling hair, adjusting jewelry, wiping imaginary lint off a desk or off clothing, picking or pinching of clothing. Again, remember, all of these indicators are in direct response to the question. Now, one of the reasons people get into so much trouble when they try to detect deception is they are relying on behaviors they don’t know the cause of.
Some of the more common misconceptions would be something like posture. We’ve all read that closed posture, for example, is a negative indicator. Well, when you think about closed posture, for example, somebody sitting with their arms folded, can we really, with any degree of reliability, understand or know with certainty why that person’s sitting that way? Why are they sitting with their arms folded? It may be habit. They may be cold. So we’re simply guessing. So we don’t use posture as a deceptive indicator. If someone is extremely nervous during that engagement, during that interview, we’re simply guessing why they might be nervous. People have been taught that people are nervous because they’re lying. Well, we know that truthful people can be very nervous during an interview. So we’re trying to take the guesswork out of it. Since we don’t know the cause of the nervousness or the cause of the posture, we don’t evaluate that.
And then the final major misconception is eye contact. For generations, people have been taught that if someone gives you bad eye contact, they’re hiding or concealing or lying. We now know through research that people who are deceiving actually often have better eye contact than someone who is telling the truth. So we don’t use eye contact either as a indicator of deception. Also, as I said before, it’s easy to sit with an open posture if you’re lying. It’s easy to give someone good eye contact if you’re lying. It’s easy to appear relaxed if you’re lying. So we just stay away from those. So getting back to this reaction bucket, the nonverbal indicators, we’re simply looking for movements and physical changes that people do in response to our question. And we count these then as deceptive indicators.
Brett McKay:
And again, you’re looking for a cluster. You want to look for that reactionary behavior with maybe one of those verbal cues connected within five seconds of that stimulus question.
Michael Floyd:
Exactly. Another verbal bucket is what we call the persuasion bucket. These are the behaviors that people exhibit that are aimed at convincing you of something rather than conveying information that you’re asking for. For example, if you were accused of stealing money and I ask you, Brett, did you take the missing $500? If you’re truthful, the facts stand on their own and you would simply say, “No, I didn’t take the money.” That’s all you have to do. But oftentimes, if you’re lying, you feel the urge to now try to manage my perception of you and go beyond the simple no, and then sprinkle in what we call these convincing statements, things like, “Why would I take $500? I’m well paid. I have no reason to take $500. I wasn’t raised that way. I’m an honest person.” So you’ve gone beyond conveying information to now trying to convince me of your innocence.
Brett McKay:
You also, in the book, you highlight call to God, calling upon I swear to God, or I’m a religious guy. Is that in that same bucket?
Michael Floyd:
Exactly. That’s a classic example of the persuasion bucket where they’re now invoking religion. They’re using God as a third party witness to bolster their stance in attempting to lead us to believe they’re not the type of person that would do something like this.
Brett McKay:
So there’s the evasion bucket. There’s the persuasion bucket. What were the other two?
Michael Floyd:
The manipulation bucket. This is where they try to control or manipulate the process. They try to disrupt our game plan as interviewers. They will do things like repeat the question. This is another reason for the cluster rule. We know that truthful people will sometimes repeat questions. So just because somebody exhibits an isolated single deceptive behavior, we’re not going to leap to the conclusion that the person’s lying to us. But if we see two or more deceptive indicators in response to a question, then of course we’re going to be concerned. But getting back to repeating the question, lying takes quite a bit of mental energy to pull it off. So when I ask you, Brett, did you take the missing $500? The first decision you have to make is, do I lie or do I tell the truth? And so all these things take time. So in order to control the process, I, the liar, I need think time. I need to buy some time.
So by repeating the question, I’m now buying myself, I’m bridging that gap of silence rather than just sitting there when I ask, did you take the missing $500? And you just sit there as you ponder whether to lie or tell the truth, since you know that’s so obvious, by bridging that gap, repeating the question by saying, did I take the missing $500? You’ve just bought yourself some talk time. And so repeating the question does that. It’s what we call a mask for the, oh my God moment. What do I do? Do I tell the truth? Do I lie? So repeating the question. Or another very similar thing that people will do under the manipulation bucket is to use what we call a non-answer statement. Things like, that’s a good question or why are you asking me that? Again, you are buying time. You’re giving yourself think time to formulate an answer.
Brett McKay:
You gave the example of Bill Clinton of the book, his famous, what’s the definition of is, is. Is that a manipulation?
Michael Floyd:
Yes, that is. We see this often with well educated people who will wordsmith. They will attempt to get us to change the scope of our question to narrow the scope so that they can now provide a truthful answer. So by saying depends upon what the meaning of the word is, there’s a way of doing exactly that.
Brett McKay:
So we got evasion, persuasion, manipulation, what’s the fourth?
Michael Floyd:
Aggression. And we see the aggression behavior often when the stakes are extremely high or the person that we’re interviewing or talking to feels extremely threatened. We see this often in the political world where these people, there’s just a ton of consequences associated with some of the things that have been surfacing recently. And the psychology behind the aggression bucket is the person being asked the question becomes aggressive in the hope that they will get the interviewer to back off. So when they feel cornered by a question, the hope is I want this line of questioning to go away. And we will often see interviewers on television, for example, or reporters, once this politician, celebrity, criminal, whoever it is that’s being talked to on television feels cornered, they begin to attack the interviewer and belittle or impeach the credibility of the interviewer themselves in the hope that now the interviewer will discontinue that line of questioning.
Brett McKay:
Great. And you gave some great examples in the book of that happening, so encourage people to go check that out. So all these behavioral and verbal clusters, they’re all dependent upon the stimulus. So that means you have to ask the right sort of question. Before we talk about what sort of questions you should ask, what are some questions you should avoid that will give you… Basically you’re playing in the hands of the person manipulating you or deceiving you.
Michael Floyd:
Yeah. A person’s ability to detect deception is dependent upon their ability to ask. Good questions because if you ask bad questions, for example, if you ask a ambiguous, confusing question, you’re going to get ambiguous, confusing behavior and you won’t be able to detect deception. Another example of a poorly phrased question would be what we call a negative question. If I asked you, “Brett, you didn’t take the $500, did you?” It would be so easy for you now to say, “No, I didn’t take the $500 because I’m telegraphing to you that I’m expecting you to say no, you didn’t take the $500.” So we want to avoid negative questions. We want to avoid compound questions. Where were you last night and what were you doing? The deceptive person can choose to answer one part of the question and just conveniently not answer the second part of the question.
So those would be other examples. And we want to make sure that the questions we ask are short, single meaning, concise questions. The shorter of the question, the clearer the stimulus, the easier it is for us to evaluate the behavior. And just one final point on questioning. We want to make sure that we ask the question in a very low key, non-accusatory manner. If I’m aggressive and heavy handed with my question and very assertive, just my demeanor alone could cause deceptive behavior from a truthful person because they’re reacting to my tone rather than to the words of my question.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And you gave some really good examples of that in the book. I love the example where I think it was Phil was interviewing someone for some position and the guy admitted just through… Phil was very low key, wasn’t aggressive. And throughout the process of the interview, this guy opened up and confessed that he committed all these crimes that basically made him ineligible for this job. And at the end of the interview, the guy said, “When will I know if I’ll get the job or not?” Because Phil didn’t let on at all that this is bad that you did these things. He was completely nonjudgmental just getting that information from him.
Michael Floyd:
Yeah, that’s exactly the approach we use during an interview and also during what we would call the non-coercive interrogation process. If you think about what our life work has been, it’s really about information collection. And to be able to obtain both a high quantity and quality of information, you have to really be good at three separate skill sets. One is of course asking good questions. The second would be detecting deception. And that’s what our first book, Spy the Lie is all about. And then our second book that’s called Get the Truth gets into this third skill set, and that is how do you get someone that you know is lying to you to provide that incriminating information? And to your point, it involves being very low key and under the radar.
Brett McKay:
Right. So you don’t want to do any of the aha. You just pretty much keep going on with the questions once you spot that deception.
Michael Floyd:
Yeah. The last thing we want to do is come across as judgmental. We’re not the judge and jury. And so our whole mission is to be under the radar, low key, non-judgmental. We want that person to feel comfortable in confiding to us.
Brett McKay:
Well, Michael, this has been a great conversation. There’s a lot more our listeners can learn as you got a second book out. Where can people learn more about your work?
Michael Floyd:
Well, they can either go to our website, qverity.com, where we will from time to time have analysis of people in the news, politicians and celebrities who’ve been accused of things. We do have analysis there where they can practice and see what our opinions have been over the years on people in the news. And then the book Spy the Lie is a great resource along with now our second book, Get the Truth. So those would be the resources that I would recommend.
Brett McKay:
Well, Michael Floyd, thank you so much for time. It’s been a pleasure.
Michael Floyd:
Thank you, Brett. Thank you very much.
Brett McKay:
My guest today is Michael Floyd. He’s the author of the book Spy the Lie. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at qverity.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/spythelie, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
