Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception

I do not understand how the authors got so much information so comprehensibly into such a short book. It's 272 pages but it felt so short because the information is jam-packed in there and presented so well. It's one thing to know your stuff, it's a whole other ballgame to present it so people (without the level of training the author's have) can dive deep and really understand what you're saying and these authors nailed it. Great book, so interesting and easy to read.

This book's authors have many years of experience interviewing CIA assets, CIA employees, and a variety of ordinary people in non-CIA settings. Their specialty is in determining when someone is lying. And they are good at it. This skill in detecting deception has done a lot of good, helping their clients make better decisions about hiring the right new employee, trusting the right baby sitter, and prosecuting the person who really "did it." Sometimes the skills bring pain, making clear that the waiting doctor's politeness covers bad news or that a spouse isn't really joking about "her boyfriend." Still, it's better to know, isn't it? Detecting deception isn't magic and it isn't infallible. But it is possible to become better at it than most of us are now. The book identifies several barriers to accurately detecting deception. We expect most people to tell the truth, we ask the wrong questions, and we look for the wrong "tells" in other people's behavior. And we try to watch everything they do instead of focusing on a small number of reliable indicators. Such reliable indicators of deception include certain kinds of verbal hesitations and evasions as well as specific body movements of which a deceiver is largely unaware. Readers learn to ask questions that require different mental processing from guilty versus innocent suspects. One technique is to ask questions a good guy will answer with an immediate--and perhaps angry--"No!" while the bad guy will need to give a longer, more carefully worded response. We watch for deception indicators that begin in the first five seconds after a question. And we look for clusters of indicators rather than for single actions. There is more to it, of course, but this is the core methodology the book presents. It's good stuff. And it's learnable. I attended a training session conducted by the authors' company (QVerity, in partnership with hemsleyfraser) this week. I had listened to roughly three-quarters of the audiobook during a long car ride the day before. Based on what I learned from the book I was able to do well in the video pre-test, successfully distinguishing a lying suspect from the four who told the truth. Almost everyone was also able to do this after two hours of training. So it seems to me that the book is nearly as valuable as being taught these skills by the authors themselves. It is a well-written, fascinating book on a very useful topic. I highly recommend it. A final comment. The book closes with a warning to use these skills only for good. And to not practice them on our significant others. Apparently catching your spouse in all of those little white lies can put unnecessary stress on the relationship. I may have made a variation of this error by giving my wife a copy of the book and inviting her along to the training. Not sure that was such a good idea. We'll see.

"There is no such thing as a human lie detector" (p. 14). Three ex-CIA agents, the authors!, who are now working privately spill the beans on the system they apply to detect lies. This method, L-Square Mode System, focus on observing what 'the suspect' says, does and reacts, and by learning to make the right kind of questions to spot deceiving behaviour. It all comes down to body language, congruency in speech and behaviour within the subject's own idiosyncrasy. It also come down to being aware of our self-defeating beliefs and limitations to spot a lie: the belief that people will not lie to us, the reliance on behavioural myths, the complexity of communication, our own biases, the 'global' influence, and how smart we think we are.The system relies on getting clusters of deceiving information, not just individual clues. However, one of the most surprising statements is that if we can identify the first deceiving behaviour (verbal or non-verbal) in the first 5 seconds (seconds!) we can reasonable conclude that that behaviour is directly linked with the stimulus. (p. 31). Of course, the higher the number of deceiving behaviours exhibited by a person, the most likelihood of deception. One of the most important things to keep in mind when applying the L-square System is that its virtue relies on its simplicity, that deceiving clues do not always equal deceit or a lie, that the system is not infallible, that the more we practise it the better we get at it, and part of the success depends on obtaining information in a non-confrontational non-judgemental way. The authors have successfully applied this system for years, and once we go through the book and see some of their examples (especially the long transcript and examination in appendix 2), you will notice that you can, too, start spotting deceiving behaviour. The book has a glossary with a short explanations of all the specialised terms the authors use throughout this work. I always appreciate the effort when electronic books have the index properly hyperlinked, which is the case here. The main downside of the book is that is not particularly didactic if you want a step by step sort of book. Some of the things that prevent the book from being more user- friendly are: > Some of the summaries, oddly enough, are placed in the middle of a page, interrupting the narration and some of them not directly related. Why not placing them at the end of the chapter they relate to? > The amount of information and types of questions they offer can be complicated because their names and because involve different and dynamic approaches that vary depending on how the subject of interest reacts. However, there is not a cheat-sheet scheme or figure to help readers navigate the system easily. > There is no section with exercises for us to practise, with hidden solutions at the end of the book. That would have been so handy especially because the book is about spotting lies. > Some of the statements about body language are familiar to me, but it would have been really useful having some figures or photos with some of those mentioned in the book shown, but there is none. Overall this a fascinating book that it is usable for daily queries about your family, friends and co-workers, not just to learn how intelligence and law enforcement institutions operate. However, not as practical as I was hopping for.

This book is well written and is perfect for the newbie like me to grasp the concepts: easy to follow, logically structured, points explained well and with examples, points tied together so you understand how they fit. A few reviewers think the points in the book are obvious. Many of them are, but I think the easy-to-follow writing makes the points seem even more obvious. Superficially, and taken separately, many of these ideas do seem obvious. The hard part is coming to an accurate conclusion about deception. One reason is because many deception indicators can be false positives. For example, a commonly-believed indicator of deception is crossing your arms. How do you tell if a specific instance of this behavior is a deception indicator or not? The book gives a framework for when deception indicators are, at that moment, an indicator of deception. Another reason is that verbal indicators of deception can be missed or misunderstood. The book goes into excellent detail about how to recognize verbal indicators and to tell when a verbal indicator is, in fact, likely to be deception. One of the better parts of the book, in my opinion, discussed the initial interrogation of OJ Simpson before his murder trial. They run through the questions that the detectives asked and explained how and why these questions did not work in eliciting possible deception. They then ran through the questions they would ask, following the model in the book, and explained how these questions would have been more effective. The book stresses the limits of these ideas. You will not read this book and become a human lie detector. Being really good at spotting the lies AND directing an interview to extract those lies takes, I'm sure, lots of practice. However, you CAN gain insights and be better at deception detection just from reading this book. For example, when you watch a suspect interviewed on a news show like Dateline NBC, you'll spot the verbal cues that indicate possible deception, and you'll never watch these shows in quite the same way. Prior to reading this book, I read "I Know You Are Lying" by McClish. Both books cover a lot of the same material, but from slightly different perspectives. I highly recommend both books if you're interested in this topic. I recommend reading "Spy the Lie" first, as it seems to give a more complete framework for implementing these ideas, then read the McClish book for additional insights.

Very good book. The authors state in a clear and unambiguous way several "tips" that may help us detect deceptive behaviors. They repeat the points, making them easier to "stick". What's interesting is how simple they appear in their application; we are not talking about mathematical topology...The glossary completes admirably the book. Would I read it again? Definitively (a quality "seal" for me). As a physician (psychiatrist) I would definitively suggest it to all physicians that perform clinical work, but, above all, to psychiatrists...

This is long but it I am so grateful and want to give my recent triumph with the help of this book....I currently own a medical spa. Our biggest challenge is hiring hard working, honest people, passionate about the business. Statistically we are average with the number of good hires but that is not a good thing when statistics say only 51% last more than 12 mos. Especially for lower level jobs being less. Many people just want a paycheck or want free services and could care less about helping customers and learning about aesthetics or medicine. Within the first few chapters I had already found ways of asking questions in interviews that when applied were astounding in getting the right response. A good example was when I was interviewing a woman whom I felt had amazing qualifications for my Front Desk Manager’s position. She had owned her own pet salon for over 17 years but sold it and went to work for Pet Smart. I thought that seemed a little strange so asked her why? She naturally had a response that she wanted to move to Texas, originally being from Wisconsin which was horribly cold and owning a business was just too stressful. I wanted to know more as this didn’t seem like the mentality of a successful business owner so I asked her what kind of paycheck she wrote herself each year. Her response was “my gross income last year was $80k, which I am so proud of.” 1) She did not answer the question. 2) “which I am proud of.” Is used to further convince me she was making good money.” Luckily as a business owner I know it probably takes at least $80.K just to run a business. But this was not enough for me to disqualify her and author Russell Targ says just 1 red flag is not enough, so after a few more positive type questions I asked another. ‘Tell me about a time you didn’t get along with a co-worker’. I’m paraphrasing because she gave an overly long explanation of events which in-and of itself is a red flag but within the overly verbose statement She stated “they get annoyed with me” but didn’t tell me what “they” get annoyed with. When I asked what ‘they get annoyed with’ she minimized a situation where she had the flu 4 days and the next day she went to an already committed dentist appointment to get her tooth pulled and was in too much pain so again had to call in sick. I was a bit suspicious at this point as to why her boss would be annoyed with this if she was such a great employee since both those explanations seemed reasonable. So I later in the interview snuck in an “assumptive question” about her being late to which she confessed several additional times having been late but of course had plausible excuses. I was even more suspicious at this point about her integrity as an employee so asked the question a different way, ‘tell me a time you had a challenging client’ to which she told me another very verbose story about “a client who brought in a badly matted dog and when after shaving it had lots of bruising etc. the lady gave a terrible rating.” I tried not to sound judgmental so I commiserated with her on that as a business owner how awful that must have felt. We exchanged some giggles and at this point I felt she really was ready to open up to me. I then asked her to ‘describe a bad day at work’ where she gave another story with many excuses why where she had ripped a dog’s ear by accident, the police and media was called accusing her of animal abuse, she was taken to court and her name was smeared in this small town which was hard to recover from.😳 Now I am a bit alarmed but the old me is wanting to believe her that it wasn’t her fault so Finally, I wrapped up after many other positive exchanges I asked ‘if I were to call her employer what derogatory things might they say about her’ to which she replied “they don’t like the way I do things which of course with further questioning her reply was to minimize all of their complaints.” Now, here is where I used to get tripped up. I usually have a phone interview that lasts about an hour or more before setting up face-to-face interview and that is how this one was. I as usual wanting to believe the best in everybody was mostly paying attention to the many positive and outstanding things she had to say and want to believe her excuses so immediately set up a face-to-face interview. But this time I did something differently after hanging up with her. I paid really close attention to the “cluster” of suspicious things she mentioned and by then it hit me like a ton of bricks. In every bad hire I have ever made they had answers like this woman where they minimized, evaded the questions, or had great excuses. Now while we all have great excuses from time to time the book says to pay attention to multiples. Needless to say I politely cancelled the interview. After reading this book the signs were as clear as day. I am happy to say I am now able to cut my phone interviews down to just 20-30 minutes even shorter when I see these “cluster” as the hook puts it.

I give this book a three star for laying out the information on the how to of lie detection. Now, is this a fool proof system? No as you won't find one. But it sure does give the tools needed to start detecting lies that surrounds us daily. In the few days that I have read it, I started recognizing some of these patterns within myself and others and at times I call it out, and at times I chuckle realizing what is happening. I enjoyed the tales in the books and how the authors have used the methods themselves in various scenarios. What I was hoping more of is more stories and practical implication of it in every day lives. But over all, good book.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this book. I purchased it on a lark after spying it (see what I did there?) in a list Amazon presented me with books I might be interested in reading. I'm always interested in all kinds of aspects of communication from storytelling to persuasion techniques to negotiation tactics, and I'd seen similar titles on the topics of lying and truth evaluation in the past. I decided to buy this title because of the intelligence agency background of the authors, and they described their method of detecting deception as a relatively simple and straightforward one. They weren't lying (see what I did there?). The book provides clear, real-world examples of subjects who've been less than truthful when questioned about a variety of topics, and for me, those examples went a long way toward crystallizing the specific points being made about the methodology the authors have developed. As the book points out, there's no such thing as a lie detector, and I doubt most who read this will ever become as adept at deception detecting as the authors are, but the book does provide interesting insights into human nature and how people can give themselves away when they aren't being truthful. I'd say the book is full of solid concepts to keep in mind as you go about your daily life interacting with other people in all kinds of different situations where truth is critical. You won't become a human lie detector, and you won't be able to observe someone's body language and determine whether or not someone is being truthful (despite what some TV pundits claim they can do – they can't). Just keep the book's methodology in mind and be mindful when you see some of the behaviors discussed.

The content of this book is very good. They comprimised their practical knowledge in this book. And it actually works. It is not about being a lie detector - that does not work. And the science behind it also shows, that lie detection on a specific person can't be trusted. But this book combines detecting lies and getting the lie out through interaction. They minimize speculation and show, not to trust your bias. Their theory behind their practical knowledge also makes sense and is biological based. It is amazing, how much you can learn about lies and learn to uncover it in everydays interaction - the more important, if they lie to you, because they want to sabotage you. I also read scientific papers about this theme and try to learn from other sources. But I made the decision, most of them are actually not helpful and by far not practical. But this book is. This book actually gave me much more for the money, than I paid for (both) of their books.

Books was received in good quality

This body language book gives points to learn as well as anecdotes and analysis to help develop skills. Its not going to make you an expert but it is going to equip you with some very cool skills to go and practice.

As a interpersonnel communication expert, this was a real revelation. Its casts aside all the body language myths that are so ingrained in teh modern day psyche, and put facts before fiction. I shall be incorporating this information into my communication and negotiation presentations

Nice book. I found the book easy to read, well written, with nice examples but I was expecting something more with the contents.