Customer Reviews

The Truth About Lying: How to Spot a Lie and Protect Yourself from Deception

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

Wow. Now here is a book that gets right to the point about liars and lying. Remember how you used to think that someone with poor eye contact was lying? Well, maybe. Maybe not. Stan Walters rips into the art of lying with a vengeance, revealing what liars say with their lips and what they do with their bodies. This kind of information is useful, whether it is in a personal relationship or professional situation. Walters shows us all the layers and forms of lying. His book is well-written and gets to the point. If you wonder whether someone is feeding you a line, read this book.

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.

Mr. Walters writes from a different view than I have ever seen before. He's not a body language expert (as am I), gives little proof of his research, so we are left with fairly educated opinions. I found several points worth pursuing and think the book is good reading for the average layman.

I read this book hoping to find telltale ways to spot liars. Call me optimistic. However, what I ended up reading was common sense pointers to find out when someone is under stress. If you want to find out truly what people do when they lie, do not read this book. It only mentions that each person has specific behaviors that they exhibit when lying. The author constantly cites exceptions to what he says and warns people not to make rash judgments. I do not feel that I learned anything new from this book. The main point here is that if you think someone is lying, then dig a little deeper into that subject area to try and uncover the truth. On the upside, the book was easy to read and was not necessarily boring. But I would look elsewhere to find a more concrete book about what people do when telling lies.

I did not know what to expect from reading "The Truth About Lying" but after reading it I now know you have to start with yourself. I read a few of the reviews that read "Most of what is in this book is common sense" yes and no. If you are not aware of the mechanics to spot deception then you can not use common sense to resolve deception. I am glad I purchased and read "The Truth About Lying".

This book had minimal useful information drowned out by tons of verbose, redundant paragraphs with spelling mistakes. It talked more about identifying stress then really being able to tell if someone was lying. The useful information in that book filled about 4 pages worth of space. All the rest is repetative and common sense. Very little of it provoks the response of "oh wow, i didn't know that." If you are looking for a book on lie detection, don't consider this as a first choice.

Stan Walters may not be the most polished writer, but he has written a clear and interesting practical manual for detecting deception. Walters persuasively argues that there are no simple indicators of deception (like looking down and to the left). Rather in order to detect deception, we must meticulously and repeatedly compare a person's normal behavior with their behavior in response to a given issue, looking for the stress responses that may signal deception. (He discusses the details of those stress responses at great length.) Reading this book almost made me wish for a habitual liar in my life so that I could test and practice the myriad of techniques for detecting deception myself!

This book is a lie. It does not deliver 1% of what it promises.
It is full of unreadable, tiresome, simple-minded text. A string of commonplaces alternated with clichés.

If weeded out and dried up by a competent editor its almost 200 pages could be reduced to two or three pages. No hyperbole here.

If I were to imitate the author, instead of referring to his "wordiness" I would refer to his "diffuseness, long-windedness,
verboseness, redundancy, verbosity, pleonasm, wordage, prolixity,
verboseness, windiness, verbiage."

That's the way he writes. But he does not stop there.

Still imitating him, in the next paragraph I'd say, just to be sure the reader drove my message home: "the author uses an enormous excess of words."

Of course, I would still repeat it a few more times, just to
be on the safe side...

The author does not trust the reader to understand what he says only once, then he says it again and again.

That's not the only problem. Under that plethora of words only one thing is to be found: empty nothingness.

If the author knows anything about lie-detection, his knowledge is not to be detected in this book.

(I gave this book a star because Amazon did not allow me to give it none)