A School for Scoundrels

Posted by admin on Mar 4, 2009 in body language | 2 comments

Last Saturday I delivered a workshop called Lies and Damned Lied: How to be a Human Lie Detector at Queen’s University.  About thirty students turned up to learn about the psychology of deception and practice their new-found skills on each other through a variety of games and role-plays.

I used a number of web resources during the day to test their growing skills.  Some of you asked me on your evaluation forms to give the links to these exercises.  The Spot the Fake Smile test can be found on the BBC website.  Simon Baron-Cohen’s Reading the Mind in the Eyes test crops up in a number of places, including here and here.

As well as NLP eye accessing cues, the other ‘systems’ we touched on were Interpersonal Deception Theory and Statement Analysis or Statement Veracity Analysis (essentially the same thing).

For further training in deception detection, I would suggest a visit to the site of Paul Ekman, or to another site that deals exclusively with his Micro Express Traning Tool (METT).  For further reading, try Albert Vrij (for something deep) or Peter Collett (for something a little more entertaining).  A summary of the all the slides I used for the event is available for downloading from the Box widget on the side.

My thanks to those who joined in the fun and challenged me during the teaching sessions.  Believe me when I say that I’ve never met a nicer bunch of people…