How To Sniff Out A Liar - Forbes.com
Entrepreneurs
How To Sniff Out A Liar
Melanie Lindner, 05.13.09, 04:40 PM EDT
Everyone stretches the truth a little. Here's what to look for (and how not to get found out).
Excerpts:
There are plenty of dangerously skilled liars--and not just the Bernie Madoffs and Jeffrey Skillings of the world. Indeed, under the right (or wrong) circumstances, we're all guilty fibbers.
According to an oft-cited 1996 University of Virginia study led by psychologist Bella DePaulo, lying is part of the human condition. Over the course of one week, DePaulo and her colleagues asked 147 participants, aged 18 to 71, to record in a diary all of their social interactions and all of the lies they told during them. On average, each person lied just over 10 times, and only seven participants claimed to have been completely honest
To be fair, most of the time we're just trying to be nice. (When your wife asks if you enjoyed the dinner she cooked, most husbands who know what's good for them say, "It was delicious.") Such "false positive" lies are delivered 10 to 20 times more often than spurious denials of culpability, according to DePaulo's research. Other studies show that men and women lie with equal frequency, though women are more likely to lie to make other people feel good, while men tend to lie to make themselves look better. As for who we hoodwink, "we lie less frequently to our significant others because we're more invested in those relationships," says Jeffrey Hancock, associate professor of communication at Cornell University
The question is: How to know when someone's selling you swampland in Florida?
Read full Article: http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/13/lie-detector-madoff-entrepreneurs-sales-marketing-liar.html?partner=executive_picks_newsletter
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This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.
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