In this TED talk, Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting, shows how to become a liespotter and why to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building.

First of all, we should start by accepting the following proposition: lying is a cooperative act. Any lie’s power emerges when someone else agrees to believe it. Furthermore, we’re against lying, but we’re covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries.

She then analizes different patterns: speech, body language, facial expressions and attitude.

According to her, the key is to combine the science of recognizing deceptionwith the art of looking, listening,exempting from collaborating in a lie. Doing so we may signal to everyone around that we are not going to cooperate in any lie.

Image source: Flickr – miss.killer! (CC BY 2.0)