How to Spot a Liar — Dave’s Diary

It used to mean something -- when you promised to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It used to be that a man’s word was his bond. Now we suffer in a culture where even the highest elected leader in the land will look us in the face and lie.

You would think we would be used to it since we hear between 10 and 200 lies every single day. But once you know what to look for, lies and liars are really easy to spot. In a recent "Ted talk," science communicator and chief executive of Quantified Communications, Noah Zanden, came clean about what exactly one should look for in someone if they think they're lying.

According to Zanden, through the use of "linguistic text analysis," which focuses on the language structure between lies and truths, noticing a liar is simple. Such things as "minimal self-references, negative language, simple explanations and convoluted phrasing, are big giveaways when it comes to lying.

Here are four telltale signs of spotting a liar.

1. Liars talk less about themselves.
It's all about creating a distance from the situation, so liars remove themselves immediately from the story. Zanden's example of this behavior was with Lance Armstrong who originally, when asked about performance-enhancing drugs, created a hypothetical scenario in which to separate himself from it all. However, in 2013 when he finally could no longer lie about the situation, he used 75 percent more personal pronouns in his truths. He'd been caught and there was no longer a reason to keep that distance going.

2. They're negative about the situation.
if someone's lying about why they're late, they're going to blame the "stupid" traffic, or the "dumb" train that never came. They'll also talk about how much something "sucks," or how much they "hate" whatever supposedly caused them to be late. According to Zanden, liars do this because in some ways they actually feel guilty about the fact that they're lying.

3. Their stories are "overly-simplified."
It's not easy to come up with a lie, even a bad one. So because of the work it entails, language tends to get disturbed and messy. It takes some effort to come up with a lie, so liars try to keep their untrue stories simple and to the point.

4. They use a lot irrelevant "facts."
Although the plot of their fallacy is simple, the way they describe it is over the top. Typically, if you need to convince someone of your version of the truth,

you’ll add excessive details, details that you are likely to forget a day later, therefore messing up the lie, resulting in your need to tell another lie to get by.

Thanks to Amanda Chatel from yourtango.com for shedding light on the truth!