It is human tendency to lie in order to escape difficult situations if they can be avoided. People lie to get a quick escape from tight circumstances, to cover up for mistakes committed by themselves or someone else, or sometimes just as an excuse for delaying something unimportant in the immediate future. If you have to take care of children or supervise a group of people on a job, then sometimes it becomes really essential for you to know when a person is lying. Here are a few tips which will help you to identify if someone’s not telling you the truth.
Body language is the biggest tell tale sign, so learn to interpret it. If a person acts nervous, looks uncomfortable and fidgety while talking or refuses to make eye contact with you during the conversation, then he is definitely lying about what he is telling you. All these signs are clear indications that the person is not confident of what he is telling you. If a person is inconsistent with the facts he gives you, then it is also a probable case of lying. Say, he mixes up different stories or details on different days, or tells you about different time frames when you ask him about an incident on separate days, then you can correctly deduce that whatever he is telling you did not actually happen.
Steadfastly resisting answering any direct questions by citing illogical or irrelevant reasons is also a case of lying. Most probably he is trying to hide something and doesn’t want to tell you about it. If it is evident that punishment will be granted if the answers are given, then it is all the more probable that he will refuse to answer and opt for extreme defensiveness. When a deceitful person is afraid of being discovered, he sometimes puts blame on others instead of owning up himself. If you are being accused of lying or improper behavior, then it is very likely that the one who is accusing you is actually projecting his own real image on to you. Sufficient evidences and proofs against him and valid alibis are enough to make it clear who is the real liar.
Intuition is a great gift of the human mind. Sometimes, you can just feel it in your gut when someone is lying to you. But it doesn’t mean you take action then and there. Instead of jumping to conclusions, first try to gather some evidence to lend credibility to your hunch. A more blunt approach which also works sometimes is to directly ask the person if he has lied to you. Chances are that if he is a conscientious person, he will feel bad about being caught lying and will own up.
These are a few methods to know when someone is lying. What you should keep in mind is that you must listen and understand a person’s reasons for lying to you. What if the lies were intended to prevent any emotional trouble to you? What if the liar was afraid of upsetting you with the truth and found it better to lie? If you are someone who is easily troubled with inconvenient truths, you might end up listening lies from people who were merely concerned about keeping you happy. There is no surety that you might be able to catch a liar or a lie even lie detector tests fail in their purposes.
