The Building Blocks of Deception Analysis

Liars always tell you they're lying. We just need to see it.

Deception is everywhere. As Greg Laurie’s character Dr. House said repeatedly, “everybody lies.” Even honest people do it—we just do it with less frequency and with a lot less at stake as a rule.

Most people operate on a scale of sorts, in which some lies are considered heinous and others are considered fine and even necessary social lubricant. In a world where media reports are full of bias, politicians seem to be incapable of truth-telling, and infiltration is an ongoing problem for political activism groups, having a way to know when someone is lying is a pretty critical skill to have. Today we’ll start talking about how to learn that exact skill.

This article is by no means a replacement for actual training on the subject. What it WILL do, however, is get you thinking about some of the foundational concepts, and hopefully pique your interest enough to want to learn more. If you’re still internally balking at the idea that everybody lies, read on and you’ll see what I mean.

What is Deception Analysis?

It’s generally used in an investigative setting, such as reading a witness or suspect statement, or interviewing persons of interest in a case. While some European countries allow its results as evidence in court, the US and Canada have it in the same arena as a polygraph—useful as an investigative tool, but not yet allowed as evidence. Like most things, it has both proponents and detractors.

For our purposes, it’s a critical tool that can be used in all sorts of contexts.

• Reading media reports, political speeches, and other outside information

• Vetting prospective members to your activism group, both in a written format such as an essay-based questionnaire and in an interview setting

At its core, deception analysis helps you to see ‘between the lines’ of what is being said by focusing on the actual words as opposed to what we interpret them to mean.

Advanced applications include psycholinguistic profiling, which allows you to discern someone’s motivational manifestation, or how they seek validation. We have already discussed how important and useful that information is in both predicting and steering behavior.

Omission vs. Fabrication

You might be surprised to know that 90% of deception is omission—and that’s where most honest people do their ‘lying.’ Fabrication causes internal stress; our brain knows what it knows, and so when it relays information about past experience, current desires, or future plans, it tends to hiccup when we want to leave pieces out. That hiccup leaves a ‘hole’ in the story; analysis techniques show you how to pick up on those holes.

I often tell my classes to imagine themselves hiking along a trail, and coming to a part where the trail is washed out and there’s a small gap. Where the average person might simply jump the hole and keep going, a deception analyst will know how to go down into it and figure out why the hole is there, then find the dirt that was taken out.

In the same way, analysis allows to figure out…

• where the gaps are in someone’s narrative

• why they are there

• what they are leaving out

• what all of that means in terms of the bigger picture

Active Listening

Typically when we hear someone talk, we listen through a filter of our own creation that’s made up of our worldview, experiences, beliefs, and even personality. Linguistically, that allows others to create holes for us to jump over.

Have you ever heard someone say something that you understood very clearly to mean A, only to be told later that the person never ACTUALLY said that, but instead said B and you attached a meaning to it that it didn’t have?

Let’s say your teenage son comes home late one night. You ask if he has been drinking, and he answers, “There wasn’t any alcohol at the place where I was.” You take this to mean no, he hadn’t been drinking.

Active listening, however, shows his statement to be omitting a lot of information, even if it is technically a true statement.

• He does not say he did not drink alcohol.

• He does not say he was unable to access alcohol the entire evening.

• He does not say he stayed in one place all night.

Would it surprise you to know that his statement is both true and deceptive? In this particular example, he is telling the truth—there was no alcohol available at the place where he was. What he’s leaving out is that it’s also the reason he and his friends left that place and went somewhere that alcohol was available.

His statement offers him two things—1) the ability to pretend to deny drinking alcohol, and 2) plausible deniability when you figure out the full truth. He may say, “I never SAID I didn’t drink; what I told you was true.” In other words, he put a hole in the trail and you jumped it without first examining it to see why it was there. To handle this, you would move to clarifying questions to figure out what’s in the gap, without giving him wiggle room.

Now let’s look at an example more geared to our purposes.

You’re vetting someone for membership in your prepping group. When you ask about their skillset and current prepping level, they say the following:

“I have a ham radio license so I’m good on comms. I also store extra food and have a generator.”

Okay, that’s a start. But what he’s leaving out is—

• He took the test for his ham license four years ago after cramming the info for a week and has done nothing with it since. He doesn’t even own a radio.

• His ‘extra food’ consists of one cupboard of canned goods.

• He’s never turned on his generator and doesn’t have any gas for it anyway.

Everything he said is true—but it’s what he left out that matters. That leads us to another foundational concept.

People Mean What They Say, And Say What They Mean.

We’ve all been there; someone we care about says something hurtful and later explains that they “didn’t mean it.” We’ve done it ourselves. But we DID mean it, right in that moment. That’s why we said it. It might not be something we believe all the time, or as a permanent state, but we did mean it.

Deception analysis takes the exact words said at face value. It doesn’t interpret, doesn’t add things that aren’t there, and doesn’t take away from what was said. If they didn’t say it, we cannot say it for them. If they said it, we cannot pretend they didn’t.

In the first example, we cannot pretend your son denied drinking alcohol because he didn’t. We CAN say just what he said—that there was no alcohol where he was, at the time his brain is referring to. We cannot say he was never, at any point that night, near alcohol—because he doesn’t say that.

In the second example, we cannot assume that your prospective member is a solid radio guy, because he doesn’t say that. We can’t assume he has a year of food stored up. You get the point.

Rules in Language

Language has rules—grammatical, word choice, sentence structure, and even nuances. We expect to hear certain types of language or certain sentences in certain situations, and when we don’t, it trips an alarm even if we don’t know why.

Imagine the mother of a missing child going on TV. What do you expect her to talk about? What would you think if you heard the following statements?

• I am terrified she is being hurt right now.

• She might be cold or hungry.

• She is probably so scared!

Now contrast that with a mother who says only the following:

• I haven’t been able to sleep since this happened.

• This has been so horrible for me.

• I don’t know what I will do.

• I am just trying to survive.

What’s the difference in those two moms? What’s their focus? The first mom is thinking about her child. The second mom is thinking about herself. You’re probably not surprised to learn that Mom #2 is involved in her child’s disappearance.

Unexpected language is just another tool we can use to notice the holes in the trail and give us a signal that there is more to the story.

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This article doesn’t even scrape the surface of what’s possible with deception analysis. In future issues, we’ll look at some more rules, and start digging into more concepts, as well as show you exactly how to use them for your political activism.