00:00:15 Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room,
00:00:20 but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar.
00:00:24 (Laughter)
00:00:26 Also, the person to your left is a liar.
00:00:29 Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar.
00:00:32 We're all liars.
00:00:34 What I'm going to do today
00:00:36 is I'm going to show you what the research says about why we're all liars,
00:00:39 how you can become a liespotter
00:00:41 and why you might want to go the extra mile
00:00:44 and go from liespotting to truth seeking,
00:00:47 and ultimately to trust building.
00:00:49 Now, speaking of trust,
00:00:52 ever since I wrote this book, "Liespotting,"
00:00:55 no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no.
00:00:58 They say, "It's okay, we'll email you."
00:01:01 (Laughter)
00:01:03 I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks.
00:01:07 My husband's like, "Honey, deception?
00:01:09 Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?"
00:01:12 So before I get started, what I'm going to do
00:01:14 is I'm going to clarify my goal for you,
00:01:17 which is not to teach a game of Gotcha.
00:01:19 Liespotters aren't those nitpicky kids,
00:01:21 those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, "Gotcha! Gotcha!
00:01:24 Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril.
00:01:27 I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying."
00:01:30 No, liespotters are armed
00:01:32 with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception.
00:01:35 They use it to get to the truth,
00:01:37 and they do what mature leaders do everyday;
00:01:39 they have difficult conversations with difficult people,
00:01:42 sometimes during very difficult times.
00:01:44 And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition,
00:01:48 and that proposition is the following:
00:01:50 Lying is a cooperative act.
00:01:54 Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance.
00:01:57 Its power emerges
00:01:59 when someone else agrees to believe the lie.
00:02:01 So I know it may sound like tough love,
00:02:03 but look, if at some point you got lied to,
00:02:07 it's because you agreed to get lied to.
00:02:09 Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act.
00:02:12 Now not all lies are harmful.
00:02:14 Sometimes we're willing participants in deception
00:02:17 for the sake of social dignity,
00:02:20 maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret.
00:02:23 We say, "Nice song."
00:02:25 "Honey, you don't look fat in that, no."
00:02:28 Or we say, favorite of the digiratti,
00:02:30 "You know, I just fished that email out of my Spam folder.
00:02:33 So sorry."
00:02:36 But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception.
00:02:39 And that can have dramatic costs for us.
00:02:42 Last year saw 997 billion dollars
00:02:45 in corporate fraud alone in the United States.
00:02:49 That's an eyelash under a trillion dollars.
00:02:51 That's seven percent of revenues.
00:02:53 Deception can cost billions.
00:02:55 Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis.
00:02:58 Or in the case of double agents and traitors,
00:03:01 like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames,
00:03:03 lies can betray our country,
00:03:05 they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy,
00:03:08 they can cause the deaths of those that defend us.
00:03:11 Deception is actually serious business.
00:03:14 This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man,
00:03:18 British authorities say
00:03:20 he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world.
00:03:23 And you can't find this guy on Google; you can't find him anywhere.
00:03:26 He was interviewed once, and he said the following.
00:03:29 He said, "Look, I've got one rule."
00:03:31 And this was Henry's rule, he said,
00:03:33 "Look, everyone is willing to give you something.
00:03:35 They're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for."
00:03:39 And that's the crux of it.
00:03:40 If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know,
00:03:43 what is it that you're hungry for?
00:03:44 And we all kind of hate to admit it.
00:03:47 We wish we were better husbands, better wives,
00:03:50 smarter, more powerful, taller, richer --
00:03:54 the list goes on.
00:03:56 Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap,
00:03:58 to connect our wishes and our fantasies
00:04:00 about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be,
00:04:03 with what we're really like.
00:04:06 And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies.
00:04:09 On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to
00:04:12 anywhere from 10 to 200 times.
00:04:14 Now granted, many of those are white lies.
00:04:17 But in another study,
00:04:19 it showed that strangers lied three times
00:04:21 within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other.
00:04:23 (Laughter)
00:04:25 Now when we first hear this data, we recoil.
00:04:28 We can't believe how prevalent lying is.
00:04:30 We're essentially against lying.
00:04:32 But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens.
00:04:36 We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers.
00:04:39 Extroverts lie more than introverts.
00:04:43 Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people.
00:04:48 Women lie more to protect other people.
00:04:51 If you're an average married couple,
00:04:54 you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions.
00:04:58 Now, you may think that's bad.
00:05:00 If you're unmarried, that number drops to three.
00:05:02 Lying's complex.
00:05:04 It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives.
00:05:07 We're deeply ambivalent about the truth.
00:05:09 We parse it out on an as-needed basis,
00:05:11 sometimes for very good reasons,
00:05:13 other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives.
00:05:16 That's truth number two about lying.
00:05:18 We're against lying,
00:05:20 but we're covertly for it
00:05:22 in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries.
00:05:26 It's as old as breathing.
00:05:28 It's part of our culture, it's part of our history.
00:05:30 Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World.
00:05:36 (Laughter)
00:05:38 Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species.
00:05:40 Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species,
00:05:44 the larger the neocortex,
00:05:46 the more likely it is to be deceptive.
00:05:48 Now you might remember Koko.
00:05:50 Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language?
00:05:53 Koko was taught to communicate via sign language.
00:05:56 Here's Koko with her kitten.
00:05:58 It's her cute little, fluffy pet kitten.
00:06:01 Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall.
00:06:05 (Laughter)
00:06:07 We're hardwired to become leaders of the pack.
00:06:09 It's starts really, really early.
00:06:11 How early?
00:06:13 Well babies will fake a cry,
00:06:15 pause, wait to see who's coming
00:06:17 and then go right back to crying.
00:06:19 One-year-olds learn concealment.
00:06:21 (Laughter)
00:06:23 Two-year-olds bluff.
00:06:25 Five-year-olds lie outright.
00:06:27 They manipulate via flattery.
00:06:29 Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover-up.
00:06:32 By the time you enter college,
00:06:34 you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions.
00:06:37 By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners,
00:06:40 we enter a world that is just cluttered with Spam, fake digital friends,
00:06:44 partisan media,
00:06:46 ingenious identity thieves,
00:06:48 world-class Ponzi schemers,
00:06:50 a deception epidemic --
00:06:52 in short, what one author calls a post-truth society.
00:06:57 It's been very confusing for a long time now.
00:07:03 What do you do?
00:07:05 Well, there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass.
00:07:09 Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time.
00:07:12 The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate.
00:07:15 Why is it so easy to learn?
00:07:17 There are good liars and bad liars.
00:07:19 There are no real original liars.
00:07:21 We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques.
00:07:24 So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you two patterns of deception.
00:07:27 And then we're going to look at the hot spots
00:07:30 and see if we can find them ourselves.
00:07:31 We're going to start with speech.
00:07:33 (Video) Bill Clinton: I want you to listen to me.
00:07:35 I'm going to say this again.
00:07:37 I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.
00:07:44 I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never.
00:07:48 And these allegations are false.
00:07:51 And I need to go back to work for the American people.
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