“Con men look for human frailty to exploit. This is most often greed. Trump found a different vice: anger. The emotional are always the most susceptible to manipulation.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Tales of cheating on school and college tests are rife. There have been instances where teachers have given students test answers in order to make themselves look good on their performance reviews. Mentors who should be teaching the opposite are sending a message that lying and cheating are acceptable.”
― Pamela Meyer
“A liar often smiles subtly while telling a lie; it’s an unconscious expression of his delight in getting away with a whopper.”
― Pamela Meyer
“As someone who specializes in deception, I’ll tell you this much: When someone insistently implores, ‘Believe me,’ don’t. Pleading ‘believe me’ or ‘trust me’ – insisting to people that you are telling the truth – is a tell-tale sign that you probably aren’t.”
― Pamela Meyer
“White lies keep social dignity intact and are far more prevalent than most people realize. Several studies have found that an average person is lied to from 10 to 200 times a day – mostly just to keep a conversation going, to avoid conflict, or to establish a connection with someone.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country. They can compromise our security. They can undermine democracy. They can cause the deaths of those that defend us.”
― Pamela Meyer
“For the liespotter who knows how to listen well, the random words, sounds, and phrases in a person’s speech are never as random as they seem. They offer a clear sightline into the liar’s psyche.”
― Pamela Meyer
“A narcissist like Trump must constantly inflate and exaggerate in order to keep the supply trains running. He has to brag about how, ‘I have a very high IQ’ or concoct stories about people agreeing with him.”
― Pamela Meyer
“By the time we enter this work world and we’re breadwinners, we enter a world that’s just cluttered with spam, fake, digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers – a deception epidemic.”
― Pamela Meyer
“We lie more to strangers than we lie to co-workers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes. And in Donald Trump’s case, lies.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Liars do look you in the eye. They do not always stutter, stammer, blush or fidget.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Business is a battlefield. You need to be able to go to battle with your team members. Like the military. Know them, trust them, and know who you’re working with.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Breaks in trust are infuriating and hurtful, but they don’t entitle you to flame out, throw a fit, or stomp around rolling your eyes. Try to keep the steam from coming out of your ears.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Honest people remember stories in the order of emotional prominence, but liars will recount a story in chronological order. Memory rarely works that way.”
― Pamela Meyer
“In the split-second before someone prepares to answer a question, he will consciously or subconsciously evaluate what the best possible answer might be. For a truthful person, the best possible answer might omit some information. It might have a few extraneous details. But it will still offer the information requested.”
― Pamela Meyer
“One-year-olds learn concealment. Five-year-olds lie outright: they manipulate via flattery. Nine-year-olds – masters of the cover-up. By the time you enter college, you’re going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it. A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Good liars are skilled at reading others well, putting them at ease, managing their own emotions, and intuitively sensing how others perceive them.”
― Pamela Meyer
“A good lie detector doesn’t jump to conclusions but tries to understand the person across the table, her personality, and her motivations. Your goal as a lie spotter isn’t to point the finger and say, ‘You’re lying’ – your goal is to get to the truth.”
― Pamela Meyer
“One immutable trait of the gullible is that they are credulous to a fault. Though no-doubt well-meaning, the naive are Trump’s base.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Contempt is the only asymmetrical facial expression, so it’s easy to spot once you’re aware of its signs. One researcher has successfully tracked it in couples as a predictor of divorce. When someone is angry at you, you’ve still got traction with them, but when they display contempt, you’ve been dismissed.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Lying in the political sphere has gotten out of hand, and because people tend to dismiss things that challenge their preconceived notions of the world, fact checkers can only play a small part in remedying the problem.”
― Pamela Meyer
“If Edith Wharton lived in the Age of Innocence, surely we now live in the Age of Deception.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Studies by several different researchers have shown that the number of lies we’re told each day is anywhere from 20 – 200. To many, that will seem shockingly high. Yet it isn’t, in light of humans being ill-suited to detect lies. The average human can detect a lie only 54% of the time.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Truth in our society often takes a back seat to securing gainful consequences.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Lying is the rule, not the exception.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, ‘Liespotting,’ no one wants to meet me in person anymore – no, no, no, no, no. They say, ‘It’s okay. We’ll email you.’ I can’t even get a coffee date at Starbucks. My husband’s like, ‘Honey, deception? Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?’”
― Pamela Meyer
“Not all lies are harmful. Sometimes we’re willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. We say, ‘Nice song.’ ‘Honey, you don’t look fat in that, no.’”
― Pamela Meyer
“If you’re an average married couple, you’re going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now, you may think that’s bad. If you’re unmarried, that number drops to three.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Pay attention to science and not myths: We think liars won’t look you in the eyes, but it turns out an honest person will only look you in the eyes about 60 percent of the time.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Study after study shows that people are much less likely to lie to a person they consider to be honest.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Cultists do not want to admit they have been manipulated by charisma. Nigerian money scheme victims do not want to accept that they had been swindled. To accept those realities is to accept their own faults. Denial of our own weaknesses is something we all suffer from time to time.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Any normal candidate who mocked the disabled or made crude reference to a woman’s menstrual cycle or dabbled in 9/11 conspiracy theories would be out of the race. Trump’s fans remain. And wait for more.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Like it or not, we are all liars. Thank goodness. Imagine going through life where everyone is completely honest: ‘Those shoes… look like something out of an early Cyndi Lauper video.’ ‘Your daughter… looks like the spawn of Honey Boo Boo and Elmer Fudd.’”
― Pamela Meyer
“The ‘problem lies’ are the half-dozen or so falsehoods we hear every day that can lead us down the wrong path in our careers, change how we do business, or dramatically influence our personal lives.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Tell the lie over and over and over. It’s an art that Trump understands well. There’s no better evidence than his absolutely false claim that he opposed the Iraq War in 2002.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Trump is a master obfuscator. Like an octopus escaping a predator, he releases a cloud of ink when called to the carpet on one of his many lies. His strategy? Obfuscate, then reference others. ‘Millions agree,’ ‘everyone knows,’ ‘many have done it.’”
― Pamela Meyer
“Maybe Trump isn’t a racist in private. But he’s sure acting like one in public. And his body language is corroborating the evidence.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Truth-tellers who expect others to believe them tend to speak naturally and un-self-consciously. But if they don’t expect to be believed, they may try too hard to seem honest. Unfortunately, the result makes them sound less believable. Obviously, then, not every oddly phrased statement is a lie.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Politicians aren’t special. They lie the same way we all do, revealing their true nature under pressure.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Research indicates that a pause tends to be a signal that a cluster of deceptive cues is on its way. This is a key reason why voters routinely associate Trump with authenticity: He rarely pauses.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Contempt is the only asymmetrical expression in the muscular facial system: Disgust, fear, happiness, surprise and anger typically express themselves symmetrically. Contempt is marked by one lip corner pulled up and in a dismissive sneer.”
― Pamela Meyer
“When a pointed question is beaten back with an attack or threat of, ‘How dare you…’ it’s a reliable signal that deception is involved. Trump is a master at this.”
― Pamela Meyer
“High-stakes lying is out of control. And it’s costing us big bucks in one way or another. It’s not simply a matter of quantifying losses in dollars. It’s costing us emotionally and psychologically as well.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Pummeling an answer out of someone never works. You cannot intimidate someone with aggressive language and think they’ll be more forthcoming… that’s a caricature of interrogation, part of the TV culture of what it looks like.”
― Pamela Meyer
“Genuine expressions of emotion rarely persist longer than five seconds and almost never longer than 10. A fixed smile is likely to conceal anger, anxiety, or some other negative emotion.”
― Pamela Meyer
“It’s counterintuitive to take a long time to hire someone, but it will save you enormous amounts of time and money later. Our biggest mistakes in hiring stem from speed.”
― Pamela Meyer
“The more you talk about – and live by – your principles, the harder it will be for others to treat you in a morally ambiguous manner.”
― Pamela Meyer
“While it can feel unfair to have to make a career decision because of a morally deficient boss, doing so can sometimes lead you in the right direction, if a bit faster than you otherwise would have preferred.”
― Pamela Meyer
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