What does it mean, for example, when your conversation partner breaks eye contact with you? You might suspect that they’re unable to look you in the eye because they’re deceiving you. Secondly, communication is difficult to interpret because single behaviors can actually have many causes and be interpreted in more than one way.

Unfortunately, however, we aren’t very good at doing both simultaneously, and we therefore often miss crucial elements of people’s communication.

Thus, when we are communicating with someone, we focus our energy either on listening closely to what they say or watching for clues in their body language that might give us insight into their intentions or motivations. However, we find it hard to discern the communicative styles of others, since our perception of the world constantly teeters between being dominated by the visual or by the auditory. When we communicate with one another, we employ two kinds of communication: verbal, i.e., with our speech, as well as non-verbal, i.e., using body language. One reason we often fail to detect lies has to do with the fact that it’s difficult for us to precisely interpret what others are communicating to us – for a number of reasons.įirst, we find it hard to concentrate on verbal and nonverbal communication simultaneously. In fact, we all lie about ten to twenty times a day! Despite that, we’re incredibly bad at recognizing other people’s lies.

When was the last time you told a lie? It probably wasn’t too long ago.

Phil houston spy the lie