Live data from Hacker News

Better and worse ways to spot a liar

bbc.com

41–50 of 152 posts

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#41

You will find the techniques described in the article used when you are traveling into Israel. I've gone through this many many times, and am still often taken aback by the weird questions I sometimes get asked by their officers. Still, the whole process is rather smooth and I've never been detained or even treated unfairly.

[deleted]

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#42

You will find the techniques described in the article used when you are traveling into Israel. I've gone through this many many times, and am still often taken aback by the weird questions I sometimes get asked by their officers. Still, the whole process is rather smooth and I've never been detained or even treated unfairly.

I've seen this in London too. I don't mind it. It's probably more effective than all the other security theatrics in an airport.

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#43
This seems to me like the technique that is already employed by Israeli airport security agents. They have a normally-flowing inquisitive conversation with every passenger boarding flights to or from the country, and they are very good at detecting when the details don't add up or when the person is acting too uncomfortable.

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#44
This seems to me like the technique that is already employed by Israeli airport security agents. They have a normally-flowing inquisitive conversation with every passenger boarding flights to or from the country, and they are very good at detecting when the details don't add up or when the person is acting too uncomfortable.

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#46
post #32

"Thomas Ormerod’s team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans" It is so sad that nowdays it is not seen as absurdal that some kind of policeman is asking passangers about their travel plans. The journalist get excited that new methods of catching "cheating passangers" are beind developed. Apparently i…

What do you mean nowadays? 20 years ago if you wanted to drive from Poland to Germany, the Policeman would spend no less than 20 minutes interviewing you and everyone in your car about every single detail of your journey. In some cases they would order you out so they could unpack all of your luggage and look around the car for any contraband. Nowadays? Nowadays you get in the car and drive through the border, passing the "Bundesrepublik Deutschland" sign at motorway speeds. For flying - I wave my national issued id at the agent, they don't even bother scanning it. No need to have a passport either. Years before the agent would carefully examine your passport and ask questions like - I see a stamp saying that you visited Russia 5 years ago, why? It really is easier to travel nowadays,but people will keep finding problems and saying how much better it was years ago - it really wasn't.

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#48
post #36
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about the "study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy" which was asked by the grandparent post, not the paper by the people interviewed in the article.

When will journalists reach the high standards of wikipedia and link to their sources?

When they're no longer paid to lie.

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#49

Not sure if trying to "trap" the liar is always the right way to go. Once I had to work with a freelance web master and we were trying to cancel his contract and make him transfer the domain name to us (an association I was working for). I confronted him by asking politely for a written copy of his contract because I thought he was lying about the length of the contract. He was insulted and claimed there was a verbal…

Are you sure he was a liar and not just an idiot? I had a boss who had some similar really deep-seated beliefs about the technical aspects of domain registration and hosting that he would stubbornly refuse to be corrected on. Oddly enough he's now running his own web development business...

Edit: Don't get me wrong, he was a pathological liar as well ;)

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#50
post #11

> Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than chance. Yet juries in rape trials supposedly do it all the time...or don't they?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN