|Observing Pinocchio (Public Domain)|
According to Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy, there’s no one big “reveal” about lying.
Instead, it takes some overall spying to catch the telltale signs. This would entail looking “for discrepancies across multiple channels of communication, including facial
expressions, posture, and speech.”
Because lying involves “telling one story while suppressing another,” some “leaks” are bound to occur. These leaks are often expressed by differences between voice tones and facial expressions. If, for example, someone is looking upset but sounding upbeat, they might be hiding something.
Cuddy explains that listeners tend to focus way more upon speakers’ words than upon their faces. This leads to listeners being fooled rather easily. She therefore warns: Truth reveals itself more clearly through actions than it does through our words.
Copyright January 12, 2016 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved