28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not so good., September 1, 2004
This review is from: The Truth About Lying: How to Spot a Lie and Protect Yourself from Deception (Paperback)
Hate to say this, but this book promises far more than it can deliver. The book cites a lot of conventional wisdom along with a few specious claims (such as, you can tell someone desires to leave a conversation by the direction his feet are pointing, particularly towards an exit).
I couldn't glean very much useful information from the book, because most of it would not stand up to the scrunity of repeated use, different people or various circumstances.
I would say, at best, it's a good fluff piece about this topic.
A better book is Paul Ekman's "Telling Lies". It is based on more sound, consistent, and standardized research and it is better written.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The truth about spotting emotional stress and deception, November 1, 2001
This review is from: The Truth About Lying: How to Spot a Lie and Protect Yourself from Deception (Paperback)
This book spends a great deal of time discussing the fact that the best way to determine if someone is lying is to examine their stress level. Even a person who lies as a regular pathological pattern shows some sort of stress and physiological reaction. It is not a quick process but it does show how to determine when a person is under stress. When that stress level changes as a result of a specific question then it is time to determine why there was a stress change. Were they lying? Maybe, or maybe it is because there are other stress factors related to the question.
The techniques go from learning to spot stress signals and knowing when a stress signal in one person is not a stress signal in another person to how to move to a position of determining the source of the stress.
The book also covers knowing when to shut up and let the person's stress levels and psychological state push them to completing a confession.
The book deals with questions of how to spot a lie, how to deal with it once it is uncovered, the social implications of lying. The book also covers the common ways that people react to being exposed and how they try to continue the deception.
An interesting part of this book is the part where Mr Walters does not let the person being lied to off the hook. Sometimes the person being lied to is part of the reason for the lie. Sometimes they set up the situation so that the liar feels they have no choice but to lie.
An excellent book on the subject from a highly experienced author, it gives all the foundational knowledge that you need to become an expert. All you need now is practice.
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28 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent guide on the motivation and behavior of liars, July 22, 2001
This review is from: The Truth About Lying: How to Spot a Lie and Protect Yourself from Deception (Paperback)
The Truth About Lying is a short, easy-to-read, 60,000-word layman's guide to lying written by Stan B. Walters. Mr. Walters's company provides interview and interrogation services and training to business, industry, and law enforcement agencies in the U.S. He is an adjunct instructor at Eastern Kentucky University College of Law Enforcement and an adjunct instructor for the Department of Defense Polygraph Association. In short, he is an expert on lying, and it shows in his book.
There is a very good index in the book, a truly excellent bibliography (should you care to pursue the topic of lying further), and the artistic layout and paper quality are absolutely gorgeous, making the book a pleasure to look at and hold. The topics listed in the table of contents include: What's Behind a Lie, Guidelines and Principles, Verbal Communication, Nonverbal Communication, Response Behavior, Using What You Know.
I would highly recommend this book to just about anyone, because there is probably not a person alive who has never experienced the negative consequences of lies. As Mr. Walters states: "Can you afford to make a critical decision, or even a simple day-to-day decision, only to find out later that it was based on false or misleading information?"
In addition to providing very valuable information on how to read the body language of liars, Mr. Walters puts lies in a social context. He states that it is important to figure out both when we are being lied to, and if there is anything in our own behavior that might encourage others to lie to us. For example, many of us are afraid to hear the truth and would "much rather hear subtle distortions of the truth rather than...cold, hard reality."
In this regard, I find the section on relationships particularly insightful. The people we deal with in daily life are discussed in terms of four general categories, "intimate, personal, social and public." Each group operates by a different set of rules which leads to different expectations, types of lies, and degree of seriousness of the effects of lies we encounter, depending on how emotionally close we are to a given person.
As well as recommending this book to a general audience, I also strongly recommend it to fiction writers. All types of characters, including heroes, villains, allies and antagonists, may have a reason to lie in a given story, whether it is drama or comedy, and it is important to understand the how and why of their lies (what goals and motivations bring them about). Mr. Walters states, "By being deceptive, a person accomplishes some goal, whether it be to gain a personal benefit, to avoid some form of unattractive consequence, or to protect himself or someone else in a situation that appears to be unpredictable....The more that a person perceives is at stake, the more pressure he may feel to choose to be deceitful." Since the hallmark of good fiction is for the protagonist to have a lot at stake, it behooves writers to be well-versed in the subject of high-stakes lying. This book provides that information.
You may wonder with all this praise I am heaping on Mr. Walters why I did not give his book a solid 5-star rating. I did not because, unfortunately, though the author is obviously very knowledgeable, his writing could benefit from the aid of a good editor. He is extremely redundant, with the same ideas and phrases repeated over and over throughout the book, sometimes intentionally ("as I said before") and sometimes not. If you can get past this problem, the information itself is very useful.
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