HS 454 FBF: How to Spot a Liar with Greg Hartley

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It's my pleasure to welcome Greg Hartley to the show. He's the author of how to spot a why people don't tell the truth and how you can catch them. And he's got a lot of information on this and a few other related topics. Greg, welcome. How are you?

Good, Jason, how are you? Thanks for having me.

Good. So, hey, first of all, let's talk about why people lie. Is it always just a matter of saving face, like a white lie? Or is it to gain something, get the upper hand in a business deal, take advantage of someone in love or business? Or are there sort of deeper reasons?

Well, there are certainly deeper reasons. Some people are mentally ill. But even for the. On the continuum of normal, because there is no such thing really as normal. But on the continuum of normal for people, people lie for three primary reasons, either love, hate or greed. And if you think about it for a minute, you might think that sounds awfully simplistic. But think about the last time you lied. Sometimes you lie to protect another person that you love, or sometimes you Lie to protect yourself that you love, sometimes to protect your possessions or to prevent losing half your possessions in the case of a divorce in some cases. And yet others are around hate or the intent to cause someone harm. And it varies in intensity as to whether a person is lying for self preservation or they're lying for sport. Some people lie simply for sport, to see what they can get away with.

Just for fun, huh? Right.

And you run into it all the time in my interrogation days. Of course, people are lying usually to protect themselves from a perceived threat and usually with good cause, because when an interrogator's talking to you, you have something to lose.

Now, interrogator, like in a criminal matter?

Yeah, I was primarily an intelligence interrogator, but in today's world, those lines are often blurred. If you think about a person who is fighting against a government, well, that becomes a criminal issue very quickly in today's world. So, yeah, a combination and a. Consulted two police departments and two investigators and done some investigative interrogation over the years and looking at people from an investigative point of view to figure out what's occurred. Everything from confessions and determining whether a confession is actual or false, all the way through just basic interrogation training.

So, you know, I've always been curious about confessions. I mean, unless someone is mentally ill, why would they make a false confession? Or maybe it's varying degrees of false ness. But what would they do?

Well, just to relieve pressure. What most people, I tell people all the time, if you think that you can stand up to a professional interrogator, it's because you've never faced one. And it's just like buying a house. It's just like going through surgery. Anything you do is a process. And if you're ill informed about the process, you're going to fall for the tricks. Good interrogation is about psychological pressure and release, much like you would do anything else. Through psychological pressure and release. It creates the need in the person to trust their interrogator. Most interrogators you see on TV or screaming and yelling and you see violence and all the Abu Ghraib things and all of that real solid interrogation is about psychological pressure and solving for needs in the person. So they feel either obligated to deliver to you or they feel like they can't resist you. So it's a process. And often people will confess because they feel like it's the only way out and that things will get better if they confess. Well, wait, wait a second.

All the time, you know, Greg. Well, that's interesting though. When I'm talking about a confession, I'm talking about a confession with a law enforcement agency in the United States where hopefully someone isn't being tortured. They have the right to a lawyer. You know, all of this kind of stuff. I mean, does it. Do false confessions happen that often in.

The U.S. oh, yeah, absolutely. There's a very. There's a very famous one in South Georgia where the young man, and I think his IQ was around 76. He was under so much pressure, and this is. I believe his name was Aliman. I'd have to go look again. But he was under so much pressure by his interrogators who were convinced that he was guilty, that he confessed to killing a young woman. There's somebody. Language associated with his confession that tells you that it is certainly not an accurate confession. And more importantly, he was in another country at the time a young woman was killed. So the pressure doesn't have to be torture. And it starts off very easy.

This is someone who's far below average intelligence. I mean, I assume that's at the scale of retardation. But a normal person, I mean, you know, with an IQ of 100 or.

Give or take, well, those people are just as susceptible. And part of the problem is this. We start off with a. Watch a few police shows and you'll see some of the tools of this raid. We would start the confession or the process by simply saying, you can call your lawyer and things will get a little tougher. We'll make this as easy as possible. If you don't call your lawyer, your call. You see that all the time in police shows. You have the right to an attorney. Doesn't mean that you have to have an attorney. And so you can short circuit getting an attorney in the room. My first advice to anyone who is accused of a crime is to call an attorney. First advice. Because it's a process again, so interrogation. I taught resistance. Your show's about survival. I taught resistance to interrogation at the survival, Evasion, Resistance and escape school for the US Army. And on a regular basis, we are trying to teach people what to do to combat the process. It's amazing how difficult it is to combat the process even when you know the process.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So let's know the process. You said there are four basic techniques professional interrogators use. Is that what you mentioned before?

Well, there's several, not four. There are 14.

That professional interrogators use, and they're tied to your ego, to love or hate, all those things we talked about before. Love, hate and greed. And all of it really boils down to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And if I go after you with Maslow's hierarchy of needs and I appeal to your sense of belonging. First of all, if you remember Maslow's, it talks about five categories that start with physiological needs and end with self actualization. That physiological needs are about air, water, shelter, or air water. And those things are important. Air, water, food, to the point that if any of those are not met, the rest of those go out the window. Then second, you go to safety, needs, shelter, clothing. Then to belonging, part of a group, social group, having love and family and that. And then to esteem, where we differentiate ourselves and show who we are. Finally to self actualization. And Maslow said in 1943 that if any of those are not met, they take priority. Well, good interrogation first of all turns your toy box upside down. Because now you've been accused of something, you have to defend yourself. Your normal daily routine and that facade that you have built around yourself, that whole self perception of who you are and what's important goes out the window. That's the problem. So now the interrogator becomes a broker of anxiety and deals with what's possible versus what he's offering. It works miraculously well. And all of it boils down to how well you're bonded to what you believe and the people that you are connected with, how well you can hold on to that and how easily you fall prey to having your ego stroked or having your are being criticized.

So give us a couple of those techniques, like specifically the names of them.

Pride and Ego up, for example. Pride and Ego Up. It's a great one. It simply says, well, of course these people don't know who you are when you're using against a military guy. Let me give you that example. When you're talking to a military guy who's a private, you might say, I can't believe you're only a private. Obviously you're more intelligent. You understand more than most people. You know things other people don't know. Well, pretty quickly the person jumps in and starts to feel good about having their ego stroked and they start feeding you more information than you already know. And the opposite side of that same coin is pride and Ego down. And it is how Ted Bundy led him to a confession. It says, this can't possibly be you. The person who's committed all these heinous crimes is much more intelligent than you are, Mr. Bundy. And in effect, that's what broke him and caused him to give information about where their bodies were at. Zeke was so fragile. Yeah. So we all want to believe that. I will tell you that we all walk around in the world with a picture of who we are. That's not always accurate. And that's the problem.

Okay, give us another one. So pride and ego up, pride and ego down. That's really two. Or is it two parts of one?

Right. And the number one that actually works with prisoners of war often is incentive. Incentive is simply giving them something kind of a quid pro quo for what they do. So, for example, you might find a person who's been out. You think about survival for a minute, who's been. Has not had exposure to things like toothpaste, has not had all those kinds of things that he would normally want. Cigarettes, food. And you offer them that, they feel like, well, this isn't what I expected at all. The next thing you know, they confide in you, start to talk to you, and it's much like a pull in a sweater. Once you get your fingers on the pull and you get that first piece of information, then the person's obligated to continue because they've already violated their own rules or they feel like they're obligated to keep the relationship moving.

Amazing how simple these are. I mean, you think someone who knows how this stuff works would be able to. But you're an expert and you say it's hard for you to even combat this, Right?

Well, in the situation. I went through sear school as a young guy in my 20s. You go through a week of out in the woods, surviving, starving, finding food, doing that, and then you're captured and you're interrogated. And although I knew the ploys, it's difficult to combat them because they're orchestrated often and one is nested within the other. And good interrogator can cover one with the other, and you fall for something given eventually. So the key here, if you're in a criminal investigation, if you've been accused of something, the key to me, and this is a good survival technique, is get a lawyer.

Yeah, right. Right. Okay. But besides get a lawyer. I mean, obviously get a lawyer. And then question is, how good is your lawyer gonna be? Which is the case develops. But what else can you do? Maybe a good question here to ask, and this is kind of my next question is, in just normal daily life, are people in our social life doing this to us? You know, we've all, I'm sure, have the experiences of friends who aren't really friends. They're just looking to get information to use it against you later, which is just evil. But.

Right.

Well, yeah.

And that happens every day.

Yeah.

Right, right.

But so. So first the serious, like, criminal type concept. But then, you know, let's talk about in daily life how people are maybe doing this to us. Yeah.

I would tell you first and foremost this book. When we wrote how to Spot a Liar, and we've put several out, but how to Spot a Liar I wrote back in 2005 with Mary Ann and Marianne, had never met an army interrogator and probably thought it was the strangest person she'd ever talked to. Now she can teach body language because I've been through enough time with her, taught her to read body language and eye movement and all of those kinds of things. The tools we try to give you in this book are about discerning whether a person is real or not. I'll give you one really quick tip, and this is the only way I can tell you to categorize people. I use the term glossy. If a person looks like a photograph, and I don't mean looks, but they feel like you can't really touch them, like you're a Teflon, you should immediately trust your instincts and start looking closely at that person for why they feel that way. Human beings connect on a different level. And people like Ted Bundy, everyone would say he seemed like just this perfect person. Everything about him was absolutely perfect. Well, you should be frightened of people who are absolutely perfect because none of us are right. We all have our warts and all of those kinds of things. And what he was projecting is what the person wanted to see. I'm not saying all people who project what you want to see are psychopaths, but it should be a good indicator for you that they're reaching much harder than average people is all I'm getting at. So that's a survival thing in a daily life to look for a person who is accommodating you at every turn.

All right, so a person who's overly nice.

Well, not even overly nice, because it depends on where you're at. In the country. I live in the south, people are polite when they don't mean it. There's an adage in Minnesota, they call it Minnesota nice. So people are polite by force of culture. But I mean, when they are overly accommodating, when more than the normal for their culture, they reach to try to accommodate you at every turn. Now, if you're a politician and you are surrounded by People who do that for a living, that would be a tough one. But average people don't get that kind of constant attention. So when a person is too good to be true, you know, if you look. That's right. And if you look back, I always tell people I have no real genius here. I regurgitate the wisdom of the ages. All of the things that people have said for thousands of years. All that stuff has everything I talk about as a foundation in that. So if you look at, for example, detecting when a person is lying, fight or flight causes a person to get blood flow away from their skin, away from their digestive and reproductive systems and it goes into muscles and prepares them for battle or running away. As a result, when a person is feeling stressed because they're lying, their face will be very pale. And in our culture we have things like people will say lily livered liars or pale faced lies. Those are all things from our history that we knew. We blunted a lot of that in modern culture.

Let me take a brief pause. We'll be back in just a minute.

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You know what about the eye movement stuff? The neuro linguistic programming, nlp, eye movements. When someone looks up to the left, it's one thing and they look up to the right, it's another thing. Like where your mind is trying to reconstruct a thing or your mind is trying to recall a thing. So I guess the concept there of reconstruction is you're making it up out of thin air, right? I can give you or not reconstruction, but construction. Go ahead.

Right, construction. I can give you a 32nd class that will help you to recognize this immediately. There are two schools of thought in body language. One is an absolutist, that up left means this and one is a baseliner. I come from a baseliner school. I travel the world and had to take tools with me. And I often say to people the tools I have are portable because I couldn't haul around a lie detector on my back. But if you think for a second everyone listening relaxes and I'm going to use an American song first, then I'll move to something else because I know you have a multinational audience. So if you relax and let Your eyes do what they normally do. When you answer this question, then I'll give you a 90% likelihood of what they did. What's the fifth word on the Star Spangled Banner?

Oh, you're asking me?

Yeah.

Oh, I don't know. Let's see here.

C. It is C. You're dead on. But what you'll notice is that 90% of the population, regardless of culture, your eyes drifted slightly up into your left, meaning between your brow ridge and your cheekbone as you listened to the sounds that you'd heard. And that's auditory recall. So now if that's your auditory recall side, and I ask you a question next time, that should also recall something you heard, for example, in a conversation, and your eyes drift to the right and up. I know that you're in construct and you're creating. So we look for a baseline of what's normal. And for those of you who are not familiar with the song, if you just stop for a second and think about the last thing you heard on the radio before this program, then you will find your eyes drifting slightly up and to Your left with 90% likelihood. Now, 10% of the population is wired exactly the opposite, so their eyes will go slightly up and to their right. And ergo, the reason for baselining, you don't want to assume that a person is a 90%, when in fact it could be a 10 percenter.

That's just so difficult, though. I mean, how does. How can you notice someone's eyes? These eye movements are. And by the way, I'm glad I got that right with C. Yeah, you got it. You're putting me on the spot there. But how do you notice so quickly? You know that there's that show, that series about the guy who does the micro expressions? What is that called? Is it called Liar?

It's called Lie to me. It was based on Paul Eichman's work.

A Stanford professor, and I mean, is that legit? Is that a real thing?

It is, absolutely. And I do a fair amount of TV around court and that kind of thing, and I run into body language, people who do it all the time, and I ask, can you do that without video? And most of them will confide, and, you know, I can't. But video is pretty easy to come by in my world. You realize I was deployed with Special Forces troops, and that was a luxury. I didn't have video or MRI or any of those things, so all my tools are portable.

Yeah, you didn't carry around a functional MRI machine, so you could Watch how their brain lights up as you're asking them questions. That's the ultimate lie detector, by the way.

I'm tied to a medical doctor who is running some really interesting FMRI experiments and trying to commercialize it at the moment. As a matter of fact, he can even indicate intent with this thing. It's amazing some of the tools that he's come up with through engrams. But like I said, yes, someone has to be willing to lie down and stick their head in a tube is a problem. Right. It's much better than a polygraph, though.

Sure, sure. But the answer to that question of how do you know? How can you judge these quick eye movements and stuff like this? You know, when you're asking someone a question, it's just like, for the real world, I mean, can we really do this or do we just have to go on our instinct? Oh, we can.

I do it all the time. And you can learn, too, as well. It's like any other skill set, though, Jason, you're going to have to start and just play with it a little while, and it will take you a while for it to root. My co author has gotten it down. She's really good. And this is a woman who never had any exposure to intelligence gathering. I knew that kind of thing before I met her. I do it on. I can watch people on TV and see it. I watch the debates and critique debates. I pay attention to what I'm seeing there. So the good thing about this specific one is everyone carries the pattern in their own head. I don't have to teach you. You don't have to hear from me again. Next time you're trying to remember what I said, try to recall the last thing someone said to you, the last lyrics you heard, lyrics to a favorite song. And you'll find what your eyes do, typically in your head, to get your baseline. Now, that's for auditory, and then visual is higher in the head. And then people look down into the right when they're emotional and down to the left when they're calculating. I'll give you an example, and you don't have to give me the answer, but try to calculate without rounding. 15% of 980. You'll find your eyes drifting slightly down into your left because you have an internal conversation. So you carry the pattern in your own head. We all carry it. So you don't have to listen to me, you just have to.

Right?

Very interesting. Do lie detectors work?

Yes, they're as good as the polygrapher. Now, realize that when A polygrapher is working often all. A polygrapher is a very good interrogator with a prop. That's what I tell people all the time. And he has to ask good solid questions that establish a baseline, the same thing I'm doing, and then look for deviation. If he asks you questions that are open ended enough, you're not going to deviate because you're going to feel relaxed. If he asks you questions that allow you to skew his data in the beginning, then you have a problem too. So it's only as good as the questioner. And I think that's the reason they're not admissible in most courts.

Yeah, right, okay. Because it depends on the questioner. Yeah, that's a good point. So what you're saying is that the technology actually works of lie detectors.

It's looking for deviation. That's all it's looking for. And we know, for example, typically I think they've added voice stress analyzers to some now, but typically it's respiration, pulse and galvanic skin response. And galvanic skin response measures one of the things I talked about earlier, blood leaving your skin. So fight or flight.

I had one of those little Radio Shack galvanic skin resistance monitors when I was a kid. And you know, you put the two things on one on each finger and then you tell the truth, tell a lie and see if it worked. You know, it would make a sound, indicate. But now they have as a kind of a novelty those voice stress analyzers. And people I saw them at advertised in you know like the Skymall magazines and stuff. People put them on their desk in their office and someone's coming in to do a talk to them about a business deal and then the light will go up or down depending on how the person's talking. You know, I can't imagine that really works, right.

Those things are only as good. I always tell people when you're talking about interrogation or you're trying to determine truthfulness, a good portion of reason they work is because the person that you're using them on believes they work. So then they give up very quickly. I really well known story among my people, among interrogators is a guy who used a Game Boy or in those days it was a different tool, I forget what it was called, but one of those little portable video games and all he would do is tell the guy when you, when you lie this thing beeps and anytime he knew the guy was lying, he pressed the button and eventually got, just gave up. Now why because the psychological pressure and the belief that he was busted and he was in fact busted, but he believed in technology more than he believed in a good interrogator.

Yeah, very interesting. I think it's called sodium pentothal. That's the truth serum, right? That's the name of the dive. The name, correct?

That's correct. And in my day we always said, yeah, that's about as good as getting someone drunk. It takes down inhibitions and allows a person to relax a little more. And so certain cultures that don't drink or do any of that kind of thing, you take into account Muslim cultures where alcohol is not prevalent. It's tougher to get to that point. I have a good friend who was an intelligence collector years ago with the Russians and he said they were great at truth sermon because you could out drink everyone as you were sitting talking to them. Next thing you know you were under the table and they were not.

Right, right.

Okay.

So.

Those Russians have vodka in their culture.

Well, it's part of the culture is exactly it. If you're in a culture where it doesn't, you know, I've never used chemicals in my world. We used just good solid process and technique and that's all that worked.

Well, first of all, give out your website if you would and tell people where they can learn more about your work and buy the book.

Yep, it's greghartley.com, pretty simple one to find. You can find me at any of the outlets I have. This is the most recent book is a rewrite or revision of how to Spot a Liar. We put out in 2005 and we responded to some questions from readers. And then several other books I put out with Career Press that have been there was how to Spot a Liar. I can read you like a book. Body Language Handbook. I have a book called Get People to Do what yout Want, which is a book about just manipulation. All those I think are Career Press and easy to find right now.

Good stuff. Well, what other closing thoughts would you like people to leave with? And maybe if you want to throw in one more technique these interrogators use. I just think those are fascinating. There's 14 of them. Do you outline all 14 in the book?

You know we took that out of this book actually in the first version it there. But all of these are DoD approved interrogation ploys and they all are based on, I think I told you about love of Hate, of fear up and fear Down. It's the age old one. It's Good Cop, Bad Cop is an orchestration of fear up and fear down. The big grizzly, nasty, loud guy comes in, screams and yells. And the very small, attractive, friendly woman comes in and says, get out of here, you big brute. And the next thing you know, the guy's talking. And it. It relies on that whole Maslow's hierarchy about bonding and differentiating.

Amazing. Amazing how well that stuff works. It's really, really amazing. I mean, that's what the car dealers of the olden days. And hopefully they're not using it anymore, but they used to do that all the time, this good cop, bad cop. You know, it was like, okay, the salesperson's the good cop and they'll get the deal approved. And then you got to go to the closer, the manager, and suddenly your deal's been shot out of the water, Right?

Yeah. You know, I'll tell you, I think that that fear up we talk about in my world, we talk about fear up mild and fear up harsh. Fear up harsh is the guy who slings furniture, screams and nails. But fear up mild is. Maybe you won't get the loan if you don't sign right here. Or I can easily say to a person, and police officers do it all the time. If you don't take this deal, I can't guarantee you what the next interrogator is going to do. It's the same thing. It works wonders. People do it in everyday life. They frighten you with something that might or might not happen.

Yeah, yeah. In sales, that might be more the takeaway clothes. You know.

It'S the same idea. Very interesting. Well, good stuff, Greg. Thank you so much for sharing this with us today. It's obviously a fascinating subject that affects everybody at one level or another. And just anything else you'd like to mention before you go?

No, I think at the end of the day, the big deal with people is to understand where you really are and to think about who you really are and think about all the inputs in your daily life that make you believe what you believe. I went through sear school a lot of years ago with some really good, solid soldiers and some who had delusions about who they were. When you get in and you face the interrogator, and it's much like any survival situation. You need to know exactly who you are so that you're rooted in fact and not in some false perception. And then no one can take it from you.

You got it. Greg Hartley, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for your time.

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