logo

Yes you may say I am very interested in that pair of cut-price

Posted by admin   ·     ·   Jump to comments

"Yes," you may say, "I am very interested in that pair of cut-price hi- fi speakers that you happen to have in your white van. But would you like to say it again for the camera?"Often it makes more sense to judge people by what they say, rather than how they behave. Dr Richard Wiseman, at Hertfordshire University, did an experiment in which people were shown a television interview, a radio interview and a print interview specially staged with Sir Robin Day, and asked to say when he was lying. The guesses for print and radio were much more accurate than for television, where people took Day's relaxed professionalism for honesty: a useful pointer for those planning a broadcasting career.Recruitment interviewers know that evasion, and skimpy information, are common signs that something is amiss, as are hesitation and clumsy attempts to change the subject.

But, in other circumstances, quite different rules apply.When caught out, liars will often give too much information, telling a story that is too structured, polished and complete. If you find someone wandering around in your office, don't be surprised when they start telling you that they have been sent by head office to do a survey of the positioning of water coolers for health and safety reasons. They've probably come to steal the photocopier.An undetectable, unarguable, physiological method of lie-detection remains the corporate Holy Grail. But the polygraph, the "lie detector", is probably not the answer. There are several books explaining how to beat it, one of which is by Doug Williams, a former police officer, who points out that his aim is to help honest people to defend themselves.To publicise his How To Sting the Polygraph, he showed honest truth-tellers being fingered as liars in three separate tests.

Then he told the machine a series of whoppers, starting with a false name, only for the polygrapher to declare him "the most honest person I have ever tested." Or so he says...More tempting is the Truth Tester, a piece of $200 Israeli software that analyses imperceptible quaverings in the spoken voice, allowing users to test people's veracity over the telephone. Political correspondents might think that a valuable investment.The truth is that honesty is overvalued. Researchers at the University of South Carolina showed that people lied on average 200 times a day, or about every eight minutes. True, most of these lies were along the lines of "How nice to see you" and "Sorry to bother you", but they were still falsehoods.

readers comments

Comments are closed.

NBA

NBA

MLB

MLB

NFL

NFL

NHL

NHL

WWE

WWE

Your sideblock text goes here