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Former Secret Service agent shares the spy trick she uses to tell if someone is lying

Reading people is easier than you think.

via Matthew Haddix/Flickr and RDNE Stock project/Pexels

How to tell if someone is lying.

Imagine being able to reliably detect when someone is lying. You could catch your kids in a fib or quickly find out when a used car salesman is trying to pull one over on you. If people could be 100% perfect in determining the truth, it would make the legal system so much easier for everyone involved.

In an interview with Steven Bartlett on his “Dairy of a CEO” podcast, former Secret Service Special Agent Evy Poumpouras shared how she can tell when someone is being dishonest.

Poumpouras is the author of “Becoming Bulletproof: Protect Yourself, Read People, Influence Situations, Live Fearlessly.” She also served in the Presidential Protective Division, working for Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

In this TikTok video with over 350,000 views, Poumpouras shares some signs someone is lying and how it’s possible to detect lies.

I asked Former U.S. Secret Service Special Agent Evy Poumpouras how to tell if someone is lying…

@steven
I asked Former U.S. Secret Service Special Agent Evy Poumpouras how to tell if someone is lying… #p#podcastp#podcastclipss#stevenbartlettd#diaryofaceos#specialagents#secretservices#securityevypoumpouras #lying #liar

What are signs someone is lying?

Poumpouras believes the key is to talk to someone for a while to get a “baseline” on their behavior. She used the podcast’s host, Steven Bartlett, as an example. “So if I sit and I speak to someone and the whole time they're speaking, like when you talk, Steven, your hands are usually here. You go on the iPad, you do this. That's your baseline, right? You do a lock, eye contact,” Poumpouras said.

Once she has established a baseline of behavior, she can tell when someone is being deceptive if it suddenly changes.

“This whole time I'm talking to Steven, he's locked in with me. He's got a certain posture. I asked him this question. He just showed me something different,” she said. “And then now I know to be curious… when you're done asking or answering my question, I come in with good follow-up questions. Cause you're showing me something is happening here.”

Once Poumpouras sees a dramatic shift in the subject's body language, she begins to ask some follow-up questions. The key is to be measured and not too pushy during the interrogation. “You don't want to be nosy, but you want to be curious,” she adds.

Poumpouras says you should always trust your gut when you think someone may be lying. “You can figure out who's full of B.S. and who isn't one,” she continued. “You feel it. I think your intuition is a huge thing and we dismiss it.”

On her website, Poumpouras adds another dead giveaway that someone isn’t being honest: if they take a longer time than usual to answer a question. She says that this is part of an F3 response, short for flight-fight-freeze. When some people are placed in situations where they are experiencing high anxiety or sense danger, their response is to freeze and become incommunicative.

“Long pauses or silence after being asked a direct question can be a huge indication of deception,” she wrote. “When the liar doesn’t see the question coming, their F3 kicks in, causing them to freeze as they frantically try to think of what to say or what lie to spin.”

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What habitual liars should know about their brains.

They say each lie is easier than the last.

Let's try it out.

I had a bagel for breakfast this morning. I am completely happy with my diet. My loan and rent payments are — deep breath — entirely reasonable. I am totally fine with ... how this political season ... has ... gajsdfasdjfklsadf.

Photo from iStock.

Damn it. I can't do it.

But there is a well-known idea that little white lies can eventually snowball into giant ones. (For reference, consider any romantic comedy movie, ever.)

So scientists from University College London decided to see if lies really spin out of control like we think they do.

To test this, they made people play a lying game, and scientists watched their brains.

The game was pretty simple: The player's task was to look at a jar of pennies and try to tell a friend how many pennies there were. They'd each get a prize based on their guesses. Sometimes the prizes would be better if they cooperated, but sometimes the player would get better prizes if they lied to their friend.

While this was all happening, the scientists used a type of brain scan called an fMRI to watch the activity in the person's brain.

If the player lied, a region of their brain called the amygdala would light up on the scans.

The amygdala is kind of like an emotional control booth in our brains. It lights up whenever something makes us feel an intense emotion, such as learning your child bought an alligator.

Photo by iStock.

The scientists saw that same emotional center light up when a person told a lie.

But the amygdala didn't always stay lit up and that's the interesting part of this story.

Each time a person told a self-serving lie, their amygdala reacted a little less. And larger drops in activity predicted an increase in the size of the person's lies.

So if the amygdala controls emotion, and we see less activity after repeated lying, that means...

Repeated lies might blunt the brain's emotional response.

At least, that's what the scientists are speculating. (They're a little cautious about making a big statement just yet.) They think that the first time we lie, our amygdala produces a strong emotional response, such as shame or guilt. The more you lie, however, the less the amygdala protests. Basically, the more you lie, the easier it is for you to keep lying.

However, the scientists didn't see the same pattern when the lie actually benefited the player's friend — just when it screwed them over.

So those little white lies we tell to protect our friends? Those stay with us. But the lies we tell to serve ourselves? Those can get so easy, we don't even feel them.

Scientists think this could also teach us new things about decision-making in general too, but they need to do a bit more research on that line of thinking.

"We only tested dishonesty in this experiment, but the same principle may also apply to escalations in other actions such as risk taking or violent behavior," study author Neil Garrett said in a statement.

Let's try this lying thing again...

I did not eat pizza last night. I am definitely not currently bingeing my way through Luke Cage. The traffic in my city is — eye twitch — fine. Just fine. And I am definitely not freaking out about climate change. Nope. Not at all.

I did it! Take that, amygdala.