What are the unusual signs to look for in that case?
(Other than the obvious, which is "this sounds unrealistic")
(Other than the obvious, which is "this sounds unrealistic")
There is no trick that gives you information if person is lying that gives out on the spot. As much as pop-culture would like some eye movement or what not.
Only thing that gives away lies is cross examination and asking multiple times about the same thing in a slightly different way.
After asking 10 or 20 times about the same thing you might see that things don’t add up. It might be easier if you have 2 or more people making stuff up because if you separate them they will lie in a different way.
Of course there are also people so bad at lying that will give out at first interrogation…
After answering 10 or 20 times, even a person telling the truth might start to get confused and doubt their own recollection. Like semantic satiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
People lie, evade, omit, or exaggerate all the time. For example, talking about things that make them uncomfortable. It’s one of those unconscious things that makes societies work.
This isn’t unconscious for me. I see everything and analyze it logically.
Detecting misdirection is fairly easy for me. When someone is actively lying, they are generally trying present specific body language and inflection.
What happens is they miss something and I see the mismatch between the fake and real signals. It’s very similar to reading a polygraph.
This isn’t a unique ability, most people have it and it manifests as a gut feeling. I’m neurodivergent and I’m able to give more than a gut feeling. I can usually point to what I’m seeing and explain it.
All that said, I haven’t found any general “tells” for good lairs. It’s an art, not a science. It’s one reason polygraphs aren’t allow in court and I don’t use this ability to make snap judgements. :)
I’ve had to learn to read people logically. I have no intuitive feeling for emotions. So I got good at analyzing and predicting people in a non-standard way. People don’t know what I’m looking at and don’t know what they need to fake.
For all of the people who have lied to me (successfully or not), I’ve seen no common patterns to look for.
That's why I compared it to a polygraph.
The gut feeling/discrepancy you notice in body language can only be used as a sign you should dig deeper. Just like a polygraph, it can't prove someone is lying or not. You have to cross-reference.
I do have feedback because I’m continually adjusting and refining the technique as my assumptions are confirmed or disproven. It’s similar to the technique I use for reading emotions. Occasionally I run across people who don’t follow the normal pattern and I need to adjust how I read them.
That said, the hard part is realizing it's time to say you're going to sleep on it in the first place. They don't call it a confidence trick for nothing, and faced with someone who's very good at it, it's easy to want to buy what he's selling because the guy's just so dang likeable.
Point being, if someone has been telling you something and then tells you something unrelated that you can prove to be false, then you need to exert considerable mental effort to revisit the initial thing they were telling you in order to determine whether it is true.
I think this tactic works because gullible people are distracted by the idea of a freak snow storm in Houston, and more critically minded people focus their bullshit detector on the 'snow storm in Houston' story instead of the 'multi-year program' story.
In Abagnales the bar exam results and prison time should be verifiable, but besides that who knows. I wonder why the FBI wouldn't comment, seems like they should know whether he ever worked there or not.
For the record I've always thought that Richard Feynman, while being an exceptional physicist, in his autobiographies it always feels like he is crafting narrative tales of how he wished he was.