Your partner comes home a little later than expected, and it seems to you that something is up. It’s hard to explain. There’s a different rhythm to their behavior. They are inconsistent in the way they act, seeming happy and then stressed. In fact, they’ve been a bit uneven for the last few days. They even seem to smell different. You ask about this and they dismiss your question by looking away and saying they passed through the perfume section of a store on their way home. They smell their own wrist, and they rub their nose and then crinkle it up as if they didn’t like the smell. They avoid facing you directly, turning their face and body away, their head hanging down and away from you. You assume they must be concealing something or feeling guilty. Your gut tells you they are lying. When you ask about their day, where they were and who they were with, they seem to get a bit shifty in the eyes, saying they had lots and lots of meetings with lots of people, and then they look down at the ground. You are sure of it: They are cheating on you! And they think they can hide it.
ARE THEY CHEATING ON YOU? Being cheated on is a common and powerful fear for many. Though there may seem to be plenty of telltale signs, let’s follow the SCAN procedure and suspend judgment at this point to be more descriptive of the situation.
You may have read about some of the most common body language signals of lying. For example, liars often break eye contact and look away. They blink more often and have shifty eyes. Another sign is covering the mouth area, thereby communicating the brain’s unconscious effort to close off communication; putting their hands around their mouth suggests the person does not want to talk about the subject in question. Also rubbing the nose may suggest lying.
In our scenario above, you focus on the key signal that leads you to believe your partner is cheating: They are blocking you out, looking away from you and down at the ground, pointing their body away from you. Studies show that a liar may physically show discomfort by avoiding directly facing the accuser or suspicious questioner, blocking them by turning their head or body, and avoiding making eye contact. You believe that further proof of infidelity is that your partner unsatisfactorily answers your question about their day and repeats words, for instance, lots. Verbal repetition can be a sign of lying; repetition distances the listener and helps buy the liar time to gather their thoughts so they can make up a story.
Let’s look a little more closely at blocking. In the introduction we looked at how crossed arms can be a sign of blocking but that what exactly the person is blocking is open to many interpretations. In this scenario, they are turning away their body, face and eyes. Blocking is a protective behavior we engage in when we feel uncomfortable to some degree, or potentially threatened by some aspect of our environment, the person we are talking to or the subject of conversation. Aside from crossed arms, signs of blocking can also include eye blocking (as in shading the eyes); pinching the bridge of the nose; clutching a prop in front of the body such as a purse, book or drink; or placing a laptop in front of the body. Blocking can indicate various things, depending on the context, including lying, nervousness or shame. Feelings of shame may be indicated by the tips of the fingers resting on the side of the forehead, perhaps as a result of guilt or embarrassment, and also a head hanging.
This is normally where you would look at context; however, what you have so far is a collection of body language signals to which you have already assigned a context, with the assumption that your partner is cheating on you. But there are many alternative contexts that could also explain the behavior. Your partner could be coming home late from work for reasons other than infidelity. Something could have happened at work to make them not only late but also preoccupied, upset, nervous or shameful. Indeed, any number of things could have happened that they would rather not be truthful about. In other words, the possibility that they are cheating on you is just one context among untold others that would explain their timing and emotional behavior.
BODY LANGUAGE MYTHBUSTER
As Plain as the Nose on Your Face
Remember Pinocchio? Wouldn’t it be great if there were a single physical sign that exposed a deceitful person as plain as the nose on their face? Well, there’s a good reason the story of Pinocchio is a fairy tale. You cannot actually tell someone is lying based on just one body language sign. And to this end, the idea that people touch their noses when they are telling a lie is largely folklore. In fact, the idea that the nose alone can display subtle telltale signs of lying is pure fantasy. However, wrinkling the nose in disgust, if detected alongside other signals, could certainly indicate a deceitful person smelling their own rat of a lie, such as flaring the nostrils as part of the micro-gesture of disgust.
What else can you ask and consider to help you either confirm your first assumption or make a powerful new one? No one body language signal indisputably proves that information being given to us is a lie, that we are being deceived. In fact, as noted earlier, some signals can mean two opposite things, and in this scenario, the signals for lying may also be the signals for not lying, as you will soon discover. The judgment that someone is lying based on reading signals that have a dual and opposite meaning is referred to as the Othello error, a term coined by body language scientist and micro-expression expert Paul Ekman after the tragic Shakespearean character who kills his wife in a fit of jealousy because he mistakes her anxiety over being questioned about an affair as actual proof she is having one.
According to Ekman in his book Telling Lies, when we are trying to catch someone in a lie, we often fail to take into account that a truthful person may appear to be lying because they are under stress.1 Their nonverbal signals may be revealing their worry of being disbelieved. A lie detector may be deceived in the same way, by misinterpreting nervous signals from a truthful person.
So here is the conundrum: The signals for lying may also indicate that the person is not lying, but just nervous. Shifty eyes, as in our scenario, have traditionally meant that the person is lying; this is why many liars make a concerted effort not to move their eyes or blink excessively. So a blank, fixed stare—the opposite of darting, blinking eyes—can indicate a dishonest response just as much as can the classic shifty-eyed look. Also, instead of fidgeting, the liar may stiffen and be very still, in preparation for confrontation. Further, you need to make some space for the possibility that you are being lied to for a different reason than infidelity, or perhaps you are not being lied to at all but are witnessing your partner in a state of nervousness around something that may be difficult for them to share.
If they really are lying, however, there should be other subtle signals of deceit that could be concealed individually yet add up to a lie. Changes in behavior may alert you that something is up, and if you’ve been with your significant other for a while, you know how they normally act, how they react to challenges or surprises, how well they listen and so on. Sudden unusual changes in their body language, from facial expressions to patterns of speech, can be an indicator that something significant has changed in their lives. The face of a person telling a lie or concealing the truth can appear less animated than it would if they were being honest. There may be little movement around the mouth as they suppress other facial movement in order to conceal the truth. A liar might be tight-lipped, again showing suppression. However, this could also demonstrate anger, or maybe even the anger at being caught in a lie.
The face could look drained and pale as a result of the anxiety brought on by lying. Blushing and sweating, classic signs of stress, are both physical reactions to the emotional strain that lying places on the psyche, but not always. A habitual liar may feel no stress in hiding the truth, and so the classic sweaty palms could be as much an indicator of other stresses as anything else. Heart rate and breathing may change as a result of feelings of anxiety around lying. The breathing may become heavy, or the person lying may experience breathlessness.
Nervousness may also show up through shuffling or shaking feet and legs, or other fidgeting. Hands may come into play: covering or rubbing areas around the eyes, the ears and the mouth, effectively hiding these areas from sight. Of course, this is not a surefire sign of lying, but again, if it is a change in behavior from the norm, it can mean something is significantly different.
Looking back at our scenario, we do see some of these clues: the change in behavior, unevenness in mood, the switch from happy to stressed. However, when we drum up negative ideas about someone, it is very often the lack of data we have about the situation that makes us default to negative assumptions and leads us to catastrophize. For instance, note how easy it was to come to the conclusion of infidelity based on a lack of information from the partner coming home late and their giving unsatisfactory answers to questions and suspicions. Having a lack of data makes us feel that the other person is purposely hiding information from us, making it easy for us to quickly riff on worst-case scenarios.
So while some of the physical characteristics of lying definitely feature in the scenario and feed into your first best guess, to think more critically about what is going on, you should consider that the signs could also be representing nervousness or shame about something other than cheating. Also, and importantly in cases of lying, you always need to consider body language in the context of the verbal cues. In this case, a better assumption is that something is definitely up with your partner, and you need to directly address what you perceive as a change in their behavior.
So how do you test these new judgments and assumptions to address your concerns constructively while avoiding being compromised, lied to or hoodwinked? You need to watch your partner’s body language while listening to their story:
When you are listening and want to put the other person at ease, use open body language. What might this look like? Sit or stand with your fingers of both hands interlaced across your navel. Tilt your head slightly to one side. Although these two gestures are not necessarily an indicator that someone is actually listening, they give that impression and can also trigger you into listening better.
LISTEN FOR THE LIE
DR. LILLIAN GLASS is a body language expert and one of the most prolific writers in the field; her books include The Body Language of Liars. We asked her to talk to us specifically about the voice and lying.
It is essential to always consider context when you examine deception in a person’s speaking pattern. When a person trails off at the end of a sentence, it may indicate that they are not telling you the truth. If they have previously been speaking and didn’t trail off at the end of a sentence and suddenly trail off when you ask them a poignant question or they share something with you, this is an indicator that they may be lying.
Besides petering off at the end of sentences, they may suddenly speak softly or clear their throat a lot, which reflects a vocal indication of deception. This is because their autonomic nervous system is taking over. It is something they cannot control as the tiny vocal cord muscles suddenly tense up, making it difficult to speak. In addition, the mucous membranes dry up, making it uncomfortable to speak. Hence the throat clearing and breaks in the pitch of the voice.
The voice may skip out for a moment so there is no audible tone, or the pitch may suddenly rise due to the automatic tightening of the vocal muscles. The voice may also suddenly sound hoarse or raspy because the saliva has suddenly dried up. You may also notice that they have more difficulty articulating certain sounds due to their dry lips and mucous membranes in the inner cheeks and tongue. Hence you may witness a lot of lip licking as they speak.
QUICK SCAN
S: The most powerful signals in this scenario, the blocking body language and looking away, indicate the need to suspend judgment to more carefully consider other signals, both nonverbal and verbal.
C: Can you bring any further context to bear on this scenario (e.g., Where are they likely to have been)?
A: Ask yourself if there have been times in the past when you may have committed the Othello error.
N: A new judgment will depend on other observations you make of subtle signals of deceit that together could add up to a lie. Consider, also, any major changes in behavior that may alert you that something is up.