The word on the grape vine is that a new TV series, called “Lie to Me” is about to go to air. The subject matter, as far as I can tell, is identifying when people are telling “the truth” or not, all packaged inside a detective story.

Rumour has it that the detective’s lie detection skills are based on NLP. My first information was that the show was called “Don’t Lie to me”, which raised an interesting question about language use. “Don’t” is a negation. Milton Erickson tells us that the unconscious mind deletes negation and attends to the following command, in this case “Lie to Me”. Despite the actual title, it will be interesting to discover which skills the writers will be using.  My guess is that embedded commands, eye accessing cues and observation of non-verbal behaviour may be included, but possibly not systematically.

Part of the eye accessing model is used in official circles to aid in lie detection. Many law enforcement personnel and lawyers labour under the misapprehension that people looking up and to their right are lying. This is particularly unfortunate for those who routinely access their memories to the left and for some who reconstruct material each time they remember, thereby accessing constructs.

It is essential, if using eye accessing to ascertain the quality of information, to elicit the whole range in every individual we interview. With practice, this only takes a few seconds. It can be helped with a few specific questions to verify particular cues. Tracking eye accessing cues in an individual can facilitate communication with them. We can gesture to help them access information more clearly, match their cues with sensory specific words and observe the sequences of their thoughts.

Having identified someone’s accessing pattern and the fluency and range of their eye movements, relative to the expressed or known familiarity with the content of the conversation, we can establish some information about the communication. However, this is predicated on expert observation and calibration skills in our visual and auditory systems to detect changes in the quality of eye movements, skin tone, breathing position and rhythm and associate them with previous answers to questions. This should be combined with fluent use of deliberate presupposition, quick identification of the presuppositions informing the subject’s language and familiarity with the Milton model, Meta model and linguistic reframing patterns.

Trial lawyers have stacked presuppositions in their questions for years. The questions are usually in three parts, where the required “yes” or “no” answer will not fit all the presuppositions unless the person is guilty. For example; “When you reported the flood to your landlord’s agent, you said it had been there for three days did you not? Yet in that time you had done nothing to reduce it nor to communicate its presence to the landlord. Therefore the damage was much worse than necessary and I put it to you that you could have mitigated the damage and you failed to do so deliberately. It was your intention to force the landlord to upgrade and redecorate your entire premises. This is true, is it not”?

This style of questioning is designed to confuse and intimidate witnesses. It also provides the expert NLP user with a display of eye accessing and non-verbal cues, which provide clues to the next useful question to ask. An astute witness will take each element of the question in turn and confirm or refute that part. If they are ordered to answer “Yes” or “No” to the whole proposition, they will have to insist that they are unable to do to.

Many people get confused and just answer “No” to “This is true, is it not” and by doing so, negate part of the previous statement, which may have been accurate. This places them in the position of “lying” through no fault of their own so their credibility as a witness or claimant can be refuted.

Sensory acuity, calibration, linguistic pattern based questioning and listening and observation of eye accessing cues all facilitate communication and provide clues to the thinking process and the state of the subject. They do not directly pinpoint lies, but may be used to verify observation based suspicion and ask confusing questions to scramble information. It would take a whole book to enable someone without the necessary skills and practice to do this accurately, so let us turn our attention to the subject and what they can do to defend themselves.

Let us say you are the tenant in the above question. You came home from work on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend and found your ground floor flat six inches deep in stinking sewer water. You called a plumber, but they refused to come out because you had no authority to pay them. You did not take notes. You called the managing agent, but got no reply and did not leave a message. You made an attempt to bail out water but it made no difference so you phoned your mother and cried down the phone, then rescued what you could and went away for the night. You came back and checked on the Saturday, Sunday and Monday, but the water was still there. You did not keep notes and you went alone.

On the Tuesday morning, you contacted the managing agent. Their plumber attended and said the drains required major work. The managing agent’s surveyor said your flat required major work, too, partly due to three days water and partly due to the essential plumbing work.

When you discover that the flat is going to be uninhabitable for two months and the landlord is expecting you to pay for redecoration and part of the repairs, you start a claim for release from your lease, compensation for damage to your household goods, moving expenses and pre-paid rent.

You would be well advised in this situation to keep accurate notes with dates and times of all your actions. It would have been useful to leave a detailed message on the managing agents’ phone on the Friday and to have sent them a detailed email. You could have informed the police of what had happened and that you had to go away for the long weekend. This would have left demonstrable trails that you had done everything to meet your responsibilities. You might have avoided the tribunal hearing that followed or at least strengthened your case.

To prepare for the case, you need to have the entire sequence of events as you wish to present them, burned into memory in all your senses with the accuracy and ease of access of something totally familiar to you. In other words, rehearse your story until it flows by itself. Create a written version, which you can use for a statement and refer to it for your own reiterations. Practice, repetition and familiarity with your story will make it harder for others to derail it with erroneous presuppositions and hostile questions.

This style of preparation reduces the risk of accusations of lying by reducing the likelihood of stress as well as enabling the same sequence of information to be offered, regardless of the questioning style. The information you need is accessed from memory and can be compared readily with the presupposed fantasy you are offered. It happens quickly with no evidence of composition in the moment, the voice will be congruent and the gestures and skin tones smooth. Evidence of stress under questioning may be construed as lying.

When answering questions in court, it is important for everyone to see your congruent non-verbal behaviour clearly. You can ensure this by enlarging your internal images, turning up the volume of your internal sounds and increasing the amplitude of your internal sensations to show in your behaviour. If you are not used to changing internal feelings directly, make sure you believe what you are saying in the moment. This just requires a match between the familiar content of your internal representations and the words you use to describe them.

I have approached the topic of lie detecting from both sides to give a short indication of the skills required to do it without using technology. It would take too long to go into the use of the necessary skills without practical training. I have identified measures for accurately recording and reporting information from memory, to give an indication of the presentation of a person who believes what they are saying. I hope it will also encourage professionals who are familiar with eye accessing cues to review their information and eschew the “up right is lying” belief.

For descriptions of technical terms (Milton model, Meta model, embedded command, eye accessing cues etc) see the glossary on the Inspiritive web site.

You can find material on the skills for lie detection in the NLP Field Guide Part 1.

Inspiritive NLP is holding a special mastercalss on this theme. To find out more go to their master class page.