Scientists are sure that to determine whether a person is lying to you, the details of his story will help.
To do this, it is not necessary to connect the interlocutor to a lie detector or follow his gestures and facial expressions. It is enough to listen to what he says.
It is really very difficult to figure out a person who is lying. You can, of course, look to see if the eyes are moving, if the person pauses in speech, if he wrings his fingers - these features are considered typical for a liar. But everything is individual: one will behave this way in general in any situation, the other will spin tall tales with an absolutely deadpan look.
“For the most part, people cannot correctly evaluate all the “hints” in a short period of time, and even more so draw accurate conclusions based on them whether a person is lying or not,” says Dutch psychologist Bruno Verschuer. - They knock down the analyzing and firmly entrenched in the brain stereotypes about the appearance, the appearance of the "suspect". They can be even more confusing."
Dr. Verschuer became the lead author of a study in which he and colleagues investigated the effectiveness of yet another method for calculating lies. In an article published in the authoritative journal Nature Human Behavior, scientists argue that the first thing to pay attention to is the amount of detail in a story.
Psychologists came to this conclusion as a result of the experiment. Its participants - and this is almost 1.5 thousand people - had to study several written and video stories about how students spent their day. And then guess which of the young people is lying and who is not. The only thing that was asked of those who guessed was to focus on the level of detail in these stories.
Those who did not listen to the scientists and chose the deceivers purely intuitively were wrong in almost all cases.
But those who really concentrated on the amount of detail: descriptions of the place, action, objects, events and their time frames distinguished the truth from lies with an accuracy of 80%.
“When we proposed focusing only on the details of students' stories, people were almost always able to distinguish lies from the truth,” the Dutch psychologists said. “When a person lies, they are more likely to add details to their lies in order to increase their level of credibility.”
Simply put, excessive detail in the story should alert - a person gives out too many details to make his story look more reliable. But in ordinary life, he is unlikely to speak that way, because - unlike a liar - he does not have to worry about being believed.
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