Customer Reviews

Dissecting Pinocchio: How to Detect Deception in Business, Life, and Love

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is great! In all the cases the author speaks of in the book, I can relate to seeing these "leaking emotions" in my real life. Well written for the general public. This is easy to understand and easy to apply these practices to detect deception in your everyday life. IF you want to know what people really think of you and who is telling you lies, spend the money on this book. I will read it over and over again. (By the way, it also gives you some interesting examples of interviews with real criminals.)

Despite the basic cover, this is a complex book. Dillingham eloquently explains how to weed out Pinocchio from the trustworthy. Find out someones normal behavior first and then use the science of body language, and speech recognition. You pick up cues to their lying when they are placed under more stressful questions and begin to deviate from their former behvavior.

Working as a detective, interrogator, and an academic give Dillingham a theoreticians knowledge, with a practitioners credibility. He provides many fictionalized, but based on real life(I assume) scenarios in which he successfully detected deception and used it to get a confession or gain the upper hand in a social situation.

Dillingham discusses false positives of detection(eye movement) that were somehow popularized in police work as well as the basics of facial reddening, past vs present tense, story telling patterns of liars, upper vs lower face, as well as many others areas that have been known to change under stress of playing with the truth. He also takes on the infamous polygraph as well as newer the gadgets of voice stress analyzation, and MRI brain scans. This is a guide of how not to be a sucker, and road map to start detecting cheats.

I'm not going to go on and on about this book but I'll just say simply that it is excellently written, has great information, and is an easy read. So often books are fluffed up just to fill pages. This book is the opposite. It's concise and warrants repeat reading to reinforce the concepts. If this is a subject you're interested in I strongly recommend this book, either for a beginner or for those more versed in the concepts.

This is a good book on lie detection, written by a cop/interrogator. You can tell from his stories that he has a lot of experience to back up his observations. He also talks about studies that have been done about lie detection.

The best thing about this book is the author's realism about lie detection. There are no baseless, ridiculous claims about how x always means x. The author is used to applying these concepts to real-world situations and is the first to point out that establishing base-line behavior is very important. Nothing means anything in a vacuum. His examples of establishing baseline behavior in criminal interrogations gives you good information for what that means in practice.

The other thing I liked about him was how he pointed out how nonsensical NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is, specifically the part having to do with eye direction. NLP has this theory that is oft-repeated about how you can tell by a person's eye direction whether they are accessing real memories or using the imagination-part of the brain to create a lie. There is zero evidence for this. Despite that fact, it has spread around, repeated by hacks and charlatans across the world. It's even, very surprisingly, taught in many interrogation schools, which is Dillingham's pet peeve, and one he tries to battle with this book.

The other thing I liked was Dillingham pointing out that he could have much less integrity in his profession. He claims he could have put out a much less accurate portrayal of lie detection science, and sold many more copies. I believe him, just based on the work of someone like Joe Navarro, who has parlayed his police work into success as a seminar giver/book author, while, in my opinion, immensely simplifying the nature of lie detection and exaggerating the results that are possible with it. So I respect Dillingham's refusal to give an overly-simplified view of the topic.

It's a good book, despite the fact that it's self-published and has had zero proofreading/editing done to it. The book would have benefited immensely from editing; there's plenty of organizational problems and typos. That is very unimportant, though, because the important thing is the content, and it's quality.

Also, I would like to say to Christopher Dillingham, if you're reading this. I've tried to find contact information for you, but to no avail. I wanted to volunteer my proofreading/editing service, free of charge, in the event you decide to do another book, or a reissue of this one. I would be honored to do that for you, so please let me know if you ever need help on a future project. I'm currently writing a book on poker tells, so you could search for my name along with those search terms if you want to find me.

Concepts, suggestions were good; however, it was evident that the author, who seems very knowledgable, relied of SpellCheck as his editor/proofreader, as there were many syntax errors, and dropped words, as well as spelling errors. Had to consciously put the blue pencil down, so I could enjoy the book.

I've read quite a number of books on detecting deception, and this one compares very well. It is much more than understanding body language. It also covers a lot of information about communication, how to conduct the interview, how to prepare for the interview, and the high point for me is the entire chapter entitled "Getting the Truth". This chapter pulls together all of the material in the book to help the interviewer get the truth from the person being interviewed. There are a lot of ideas here that I've not read before, and a number of techniques that anyone can start using right away. My job involves interviewing people for possible employment, so it's very useful for me to know when someone is telling the truth or not, and I expect that this book will prove very valuable in my job.

The author is a former police officer, and many of the examples come from his experience on the force. This gives a level of reality to the book that is really good to see. This book is packed with lots of information, and I'm going to read it again just to be sure that I got everything. Each chapter ends with a "Things to Remember", which is a very useful summary. Unfortunately the book does not have an index, so it will be more difficult finding specific passages. All in all, an excellent job, I'm very glad I read it, and I can happily recommend it to others.

Russ Conte

I won't tell you that you won't see some things you've seen before, but even when you do, the frames the author uses to discuss them will leave you with the feeling that you've exapnded your mind once again. Then, there is the stuff you probably have NOT heard or read before, the book is sprinkled with plenty in this area. I refer to it often.

You will learn the best lesson in lie detection by contrasting the promising title of this book to its meager contents. It should be titled " A Few General Stories and Suggestions on Deception from My Investigative Experience" or "A Brief Overview of Deception from a Criminal Investigative Perspective."

Definitely not "meaty" enough based on the title and author's purported background.

Book was estimated to arrive on 4 September 2010, but did not show up until 8 September 2010. Arrived four days later in perfect condition.