E95 — Overconfidence — Deception Tips Podcast
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Deception Tip 95: Take care not to be overconfident in your lie spotting ability. Liars may play on that confidence and use your power against you.
Hello and welcome to the Deception Tips podcast where you will learn amazing cues to detect deceit that will help you read people like never before. I’m your host Spencer Coffman, let’s get started.
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Hello and welcome to episode 95 of the Deception Tips podcast. Last week, we spoke about a type of person who may not exhibit signs of deception when they’re lying. The reason is that this person lies frequently, so they have become used to lying. They know how to lie and they aren’t worried about lying.
In essence, they don’t feel guilt or shame or anything like that when they lie, they don’t have a conscience that’s telling them that lying is wrong. These people are pathological liars and they tell lies like nothing, they simply speak and lies come out, you probably know someone like this.
This person may not be diagnosed as a pathological liar because they may not have all of the problems to qualify for a psychological disorder.
However, you know that this person lies frequently and it seems like they lie all the time, they speak out of both sides of their mouth, so to speak. These people, because they’re so comfortable with lying, they may not display the bodily signs of leakage or vocal signs of leakage that we’ve been studying over these episodes of the Deception Tips podcast.
What they may do though, is when they’re telling the truth, they may exhibit some of these signs of discomfort or these leakage signs that show uncomfortableness. They want to do a pacification gesture to pacify the stress and tension not with telling a lie but with telling the truth.
If they are normally comfortable telling lies, when they tell the truth, they become a little bit uncomfortable. Therefore, they want to exhibit something to relieve the stress and tension involved in telling the truth. You may see signs in pathological liars when they’re telling the truth rather than when they’re lying.
In order to interpret which is which, you need to know what their baseline behavior is, you need to know how they behave normally, and how are they in a regular situation.
Then if you see that there is a deviation from the baseline behavior, you will be able to tell what’s going on. Are they telling the truth? Are they telling you a lie? You’ll have to determine that based on the situation and the circumstance.
Today, we are going to talk about another tip for you, this is specifically for you as the person who is going to do the interrogating or the questioning. This is for those targets, it’s not a sign on liars, this is a sign for you. It’s something that you can do to help yourself become more able to read people and detect deception.
Now, it’s not even about reading people and detecting deception, this one is more about self-awareness. It’s about being aware of what’s going on so that you do not mess up and so that you do not let yourself get taken advantage of by the person who is lying and trying to fool you.
You need to pay attention and you need to know what’s going on because if you slip up and they know it, they may walk all over you and you might not ever get the truth. So, it’s important for you to have a good strategy and to know what you’re asking. You’re going to have everything planned out and you’re going to have everything in a controlled environment.
You can really get to the truth without any outside factors or anything else happening. So, we’re talking about a feeling that you will get when you feel like you are really smart at knowing how to read people and detect deception. It’s a good feeling, you’re going to become more confident and confidence is important.
Now that you’ve studied a lot of these different signs and behaviors, you’re, no doubt, getting good at reading people and detecting deception, therefore, you should be confident. However, you need to be careful to not be overconfident because overconfidence is like arrogance or it could be pride and it’s a bit foolish.
When you become overconfident, you start to mess up or you run the risk of messing up. If someone sees that you’re overconfident, they may try to take advantage of you by leading you down the wrong path, so to speak. So, watch out for overconfidence, it can really mess up your lie-detecting ability because people will take advantage of that and then you’ll be in real trouble.
So, here it is, this is Deception Tip number 95. Take care not to be overconfident in your lie spotting ability. Liars may play on that confidence and use your power against you. Here it is again, Deception Tip number 95. Take care not to be overconfident in your lie spotting ability. Liars may play on that confidence and use your power against you.
What does this mean? Well, if you are detecting lies and it is clear that you know what you’re doing, that you are a little bit flaunting your abilities, and that you know how to read people and detect deception. If you start calling out lies, left and right and then you tell people that you know they’re lying, so there’s no point in lying to me because I’ll be able to tell.
If you see a lie, you point it out and you say, you see what you did right there when you put your hand like this over your eye and then you did this well, that means that you don’t really like whatever it is you just said. You don’t really believe it, therefore, it’s potentially a lie and I tell you this so you realize that there’s no point in lying to me.
If you tell people things like that and you show them that you are the top dog and that you know what’s going on, that’s a little bit of cockiness. So, if they interpret that as this guy is cocky, he’s arrogant, he’s a pompous, they may not like you, they’re going to have that dislike because you think you’re all that.
No one likes that, nobody likes it when someone else thinks that they’re better than everybody else. No one wants to feel that way, no one wants to feel less than everybody else or less than a person. So, if you start behaving that way and you get someone who is going to do something about it, when they’re telling you their story, they may start to do different things.
Whether they intentionally leak a certain sign or a few signs or whether they tell you multiple stories or whether they just keep giving you the runaround, essentially, it’s going to make your job a lot harder. Therefore it’s better to be humble about your ability and to use it to point out truths and lies that matter, not just all the time and flaunting it.
People will know, yeah, he can really read people, wow. That’s not what it’s for, you need to be humble in your ability so that you can use it when it’s important. I’m going to give you some more examples of different things and reasons that people may start to lead you astray and what to avoid coming up right after this.
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Welcome back to episode 95 of the Deception Tips podcast where we are talking about being overconfident. Overconfidence isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, it’s a bad thing when it leads to pride, arrogance, being cocky, and feeling like you’re better than everybody else because you know how to read people and they don’t.
So, if you have those feelings and you display them around other people or you make them known, then they’re not going to like you that much. Nobody likes being lesser than other people, they don’t like to feel lesser than other people and when you’re directly telling them that then they immediately feel lesser.
If they feel like that and they don’t like you and you’re trying to get the truth from them, they’re probably not going to give it to you just out of spite. They might lead you on different paths, lead you astray, give you funny answers, and send you down wild goose chases or rabbit holes. The bottom line on this is to be humble with your lie spotting ability.
Use it to call out lies that are important or that make a difference, use it to find the truth in cases that matter. I’m not talking about only police business here, cases that matter, finding stolen items, solving murders, or something like that. No, I’m talking about in general, in any case-by-case basis, use it when it’s important.
Don’t use it on these tiny low stake lies like, are you really feeling good today or not, or are you really happy, or did you really do this yesterday? These little things don’t really matter, if they don’t matter then they’re not that important. Remember we talked about that, asking yourself if lies really matter before you call them out.
That was Deception Tip episode number 88 on the importance of calling out lies and being sure that when you call out a lie it’s something that you want to call out. If you call out every little thing you’re just going to embarrass people and you’re going to make yourself look like a jerk, so you need to think about what you’re doing.
Not that I’m arguing that it’s okay for people to lie, it’s not, people should just be telling the truth all the time, but is it okay for you to point out everybody’s flaws and errors all the time?
Not really because you lie too, you’re no better than all of them. So, if you do point out all their flaws and errors all the time then they’re going to see you as better than them or they think you think that you’re better than them and they’re not going to like you then either.
Why do you care if people like you? Well, you really don’t, it doesn’t matter that much but when you are trying to get something from someone else, it helps a lot if they don’t dislike you. Therefore, when you are using your abilities to spot lies, the less that the person you are interrogating or speaking with knows about your ability, the better.
If they don’t know that you have the ability to read body language and interpret vocal signs and watch for gestures and patterns and clusters of behavior. If they don’t know that you have that ability then they won’t be trying to hide any of those behaviors, leakage, or body language signs. They won’t hide any of that stuff intentionally if they don’t know that you can see it.
However, if they know, okay, wait a minute, I’m going to go talk to so-and-so and they’re really good at reading people and detecting lies, that means I have to be careful.
I have to put my body on lockdown and make sure that I’m not going to give up any hidden signs or leakage. They’re going to think about the different things that they know and they may intentionally do some false signs and may intentionally hold some back.
Not everybody knows all of the body language signs in this podcast, they may know four or five, if that. Maybe they’ve seen some on TV and they think they know several but they don’t know what they mean. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about anybody else knowing all this stuff because it’s a very small amount of the population that can actually read people and detect deception at an above chance level.
That’s 50/50, which means that most people are out there simply guessing. You’re not guessing anymore, you studied this, you’ve listened to 95 episodes now and you know more than the average person. However, the average person currently doesn’t know that you know more.
Therefore, when you are speaking with them and are detecting their lies, they don’t have anything to fear. They figure that, hey, I can’t read lies, I’m an average person and it’s a 50/50 chance because no one else can really read lies either. So, I’ll lie to this guy and he won’t be able to read me, or this girl and she won’t be able to read me.
However, that’s where they’re wrong because you have studied this and you know that it’s important to read people and detect deception so that you are not going to be hurt by lies. To their surprise, you’ll catch them in their lies and you’re not going to be hurt. However, if you’re out there before every conversation and in every conversation telling people, oh yeah, I studied body language and deception.
I’m the best and I know how to read people, so don’t ever try to lie to me and if you do lie, I’m going to catch you. Well, then you’re going to get people that want to challenge that, you’re going to get people that even just for fun, say, hey, I’m going to tell you a couple of things and you tell me which one is a lie. If you’re put on the spot like that all the time, things never work out as they should. So, the bottom line, again, be humble with your lie-detecting ability.
I want to thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Deception Tips podcast. I hope that you’ll share it with your friends, subscribe to the feed, take a look at the Deception Tips videos, the blog, and check out the books I have available, and, as always, tune in next week for a new deception tip.
DECEPTION TIPS PODCAST BY SPENCER COFFMAN
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