Deception Cues Quotes

We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. In a survey of attitudes toward deception conducted a few years ago, which involved thousands of people in fifty-eight countries around the world, 63 percent of those asked said the cue they most used to spot a liar was “gaze aversion.” We think liars in real life behave like liars would on Friends—telegraphing their internal states with squirming and darting eyes. This is—to put it mildly—nonsense. Liars don’t look away. But Levine’s point is that our stubborn belief in some set of nonverbal behaviors associated with deception explains the pattern he finds with his lying tapes. The people we all get right are the ones who match—whose level of truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look.

Both sexes typically get extremely upset at cues to both sexual and emotional infidelity, as they should—people sometimes fall in love with those with whom they have sex and conversely have sex with those with whom they become emotionally involved. So researchers asked: What would upset you more: (A) Imagining your partner having sexual intercourse with someone else? Or (B) imagining your partner falling in love with someone else? This method revealed large sex differences, with the majority of men, roughly 60 percent, selecting sexual infidelity (A) and most women, roughly 85 percent, selecting emotional infidelity (B).

The psychological devastation women experience stems in part from damage to a woman’s sexual reputation. This reputation, in turn, is formed and driven by two key evolutionary forces of sexual selection—men’s mate preferences and women’s intrasexual competition. Men worldwide prioritize sexual fidelity in long-term mates. Men interpret cues to perceived promiscuity as compromising prospects for fidelity in a committed partner. In contrast, men are attracted to cues of a woman’s perceived promiscuity when they seek casual sex partners because these cues convey information about their chances of succeeding sexually. So victims of revenge porn suffer damage to their long-term mate value in the eyes of men. Women perceived as promiscuous, even if that perception is entirely erroneous and based on images they themselves have not posted, also tend to be slotted in the male brain as potential short-term mates.

This should not upset you but liberate you. The book will teach you to stop taking personally their insinuating comments, shows of coldness, or moments of irritation. The more you grasp this, the easier it will be to react not with your emotions but rather with the desire to understand where their behavior might come from. You will feel much calmer in the process. And as this takes root in you, you will be less prone to moralize and judge people; instead you will accept them and their flaws as part of human nature. People will like you all the more as they sense this tolerant attitude in you. Second, the Laws will make you a master interpreter of the cues that people continually emit, giving you a much greater ability to judge their character. Normally, if we pay attention to people’s behavior, we are in a rush to fit their actions into categories and to hurry to conclusions, so we settle for the judgment that suits our own preconceptions. Or we accept their self-serving explanations. The Laws will rid you of this habit by making it clear how easy it is to misread people and how deceptive first impressions can be. You will slow yourself down, mistrust your initial judgment, and instead train yourself to analyze what you see. You will think in terms of opposites—when people overtly display some trait, such as confidence or hypermasculinity, they are most often concealing the contrary reality. You will realize that people are continually playing to the public, making a show of being progressive and saintly only to better disguise their shadow. You will see the signs of this shadow leaking out in everyday life. If people take an action that seems out of character, you will take note: what often appears out of character is actually more of their true character. If people are essentially lazy or foolish, they leave clues to this in the smallest of details that you can pick up well before their behavior harms you.

Axiomatic to my view of therapy is that one cannot not interact: one cannot not influence. The major instrument of mystification is language; language being not merely speech, but the sum of all its semi-otic cues: non-verbal—that is, tonal, prosodic—and nuances of irony, sarcasm, and humour. The child learns, as Laing put it, to not know what it knows it knows; that is, the child is essentially talked out of her perceptions. But language, unfortunately, is less about communication of information than about deception and control—power. This “anxiety of influence”, as every therapist is aware, may keep the patient from accepting insights from the therapist who may well be right but experienced as intrusive (Bloom 1973). So, again from the interpersonal view, resolving neurotic conflict means getting a better grasp of what’s going on around you and to you; that is, mastering the semiotic world of experience.

the most effective lies are the ones that are mostly true. Here’s a little free advice for those of you wanting to grow in the art of deception: spin a tale in which 95 percent of what you say is accurate; just make the 5 percent of inaccuracy the linchpin that undoes your mark. the next most effective lies are those that are true but not the whole truth. They are one side of a two-sided conversation or an oversimplification of the complex reality of life. Cue the “Yes, but…” or “Yes, and…” retorts in a debate.

The three categories of the most important cues to observe and identify are dislike/like, dominance/submission, and deception.

Though we may show a polite grin or camera smile at will, the zygomatic or heartfelt smile is hard to produce on demand. While the former cue may be consciously manipulated (and is subject to deception), the latter is controlled by emotion. Thus, the zygomatic smile is a more accurate reflection of mood.

When a Single Glance Can Cost a Million Dollars Under conditions of stress, the human body responds in predictable ways: increased heart rate, pupil dilation, perspiration, fine motor tremors, tics. In high-pressure situations, such as negotiating an employment package or being cross-examined under oath, no matter how we might try to play it cool, our bodies give us away. We broadcast our emotional state, just as Marilyn Monroe broadcast her lust for President Kennedy. We each exhibit a unique and consistent pattern of stress signals. For those who know how to read such cues, we’re essentially handing over a dictionary to our body language. Those closest to us probably already recognize a few of our cues, but an expert can take it one step further, and closely predict our actions. Jeff “Happy” Shulman is one such expert. Happy is a world-class poker player. To achieve his impressive winnings, he’s spent much of his life mastering mystique. At the highest level of play, winning depends not merely on skill, experience, statistics, or even luck with the cards, but also on an intimate understanding of human nature. In poker, the truth isn’t written just all over your face. The truth is written all over your body. Drops of Sweat, a Nervous Blink, and Other “Tells” Tournament poker is no longer a game of cards, but a game of interpretation, deception, and self-control. In an interview, Happy says that memorizing and recognizing your opponent’s nuances can be more decisive than luck or skill. Imperceptible gestures can reveal a million dollars’ worth of information. Players call these gestures “tells.” With a tell, a player unintentionally exposes his thoughts and intentions to the rest of the table. The ability to hide one’s tells—and conversely, to read the other players’ tells—offers a distinct advantage. At the amateur level, tells are simpler. Feet and legs are the biggest moving parts of your body, so skittish tapping is a dead giveaway. So is looking at a hand of cards and smiling, or rearranging cards with quivering fingertips. But at the professional level, tells would be almost impossible for you or me to read. Happy spent his career learning how to read these tells. “If you know what the other player is going to do, it’s easier to defend against it.” Like others competing at his level, Happy might prepare for a major tournament by spending hours reviewing tapes of his competitors’ previous games in order to instantly translate their tells during live competition.

plants are so much more. When I look at them, I see an intricate balance of light, water, and nutrients, chemical reactions responding to environmental cues and variables. The plants and their interactions with their environment and with one another tell a story, a story of competition and victory, of deception and commerce, of sex and survival. There are enough stories to fill dozens of books