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16 Deception at Work

equally between males and females,4 it is amazing that proportionately less women are detected
in dishonesty. This could be that they are innately more honest than men, more clever, or,
more likely, both.

To simplify sentence construction, the masculine gender is used throughout and we hope
this does not offend anyone.

GIVING THE GAME AWAY

Some people might believe that writing books like this helps liars plan their defences and
therefore should be suppressed. This is wrong and, on the contrary, the more the liar knows and
becomes anxious about the clues he is emanating into the ether, the more likely he is to fail.

THE TURN IN THE BARREL subject focuses on surviving the interview.
At this time, it is a closed world in which the
Where a person is being questioned about more he understands, the more difficult it
dishonesty, the world ceases to exist outside becomes to repress the truth.
the room in which the interview is taking
place. Family, friends and other problems
disappear into the background while the

Liars know too much; if you think telling the truth is difficult, try lying.
When it is your turn in the barrel, things look different

Misconceptions and myths about deception

WHAT INTEREST IN SOLUTIONS?

There are few subjects which are as fraught with misconception, danger and emotion as the
art of deception and the quest to identify and isolate its symptoms. Paradoxically, once symp-
toms have been recognized, there appears to be little interest in actually resolving them. This
unwillingness to expose deception is clearly demonstrated in a recent book by a respected
academic which devotes 220 pages to reviewing abstruse publications by his colleagues on the
nature of lies and four and a half pages on how to resolve them!

It is easier to identify a problem than to suggest a solution

It is easy to discover when people are lying: in fact we are flooded with clues. What you do
once you are put on notice is an entirely different matter, and it is in this area that the void
of knowledge and lack of applied techniques are at their most extreme. No one, except for a
few American investigators and lawyers, seems prepared to offer advice on how lies should
be tackled and the deep truth exposed, except in the case of exculpatory lies. This is another
paradox because, for the reasons explained later, it is much better to catch lies in the achieve-
ment stage, before the damage has been done.

People want to know how to detect lies but not how to tackle them

4 Except in Cheam and Islington