Detection of fraud by words

Surprisingly, many liars give out careless statements. Not that they were unable to express their thoughts in any other way or tried but failed, no, they simply did not consider it necessary to carefully select words. The head of the company engaged in the selection of executives, spoke about the man twice in one year, referring to them in the agency under two different names. When this person was asked what name to call him, he “first called himself Leslie D'Einter, and then Lester Dainter, lied without hesitation, explaining that he changed his name because Leslie is too much like a female, and his last name is for ease of pronunciation . But he was given feedback from former employers. He presented three enthusiastic reference letters; and in all three his name was written differently ^[60] .
Even a cautious liar can fail what Sigmund Freud defined as a language reservation. In “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Freud demonstrated that the blunders made in everyday life, for example, reservations, erroneous naming and mistakes made during reading and writing, are not accidental and indicate internal psychological conflicts. A reservation, he said, becomes a kind of “tool ... with which you express what you don’t want to say, with which you betray yourself” ^[61] .
Freud was not particularly interested in deception, but one of the examples he cited describes a reservation that betrayed lies. He describes the case of Dr. Brill, one of the very first and well-known followers of Freud.
“One evening I went for a walk with Dr. Frink, and we discussed some of the affairs of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. We met a colleague of Dr. R., whom I had not seen for many years and did not know anything about my personal life. We were very happy to meet again and invited him to a cafe where we spent 2 hours for a lively conversation. He seemed to know some of the details of my life, because after the usual greetings he asked about my little child and told me that he had heard about me from time to time from a mutual friend, and that my work interested him since he read about her in the medical press. When I asked if he was married, the doctor answered negatively and added: “Why should a man like me get married?”
When we were leaving the cafe, he suddenly turned to me and said: “I would like to know what you would do in the next case. I know one nanny who was brought as a correspondent in the divorce case. My wife sued her husband and called her a correspondent, and he got a divorce. " I interrupted him, noting: "You wanted to say she got a divorce." He immediately recovered: "Well, yes, of course, she got a divorce," and continued the story that the divorce proceedings and the scandal had so much effect on the poor nurse that she began to drink, became very nervous, and so on; but in the end he asked for advice on how to treat it.
As soon as I corrected his mistake, I asked to explain it, but I received only ordinary surprised answers: everyone can make a reservation, it happened by chance, nothing stands behind it, and so on. I replied that for every reservation there must be a reason and that if he didn’t tell me that he was not married, I would have thought that he was talking about himself; because in this case, the reservation can be explained precisely by his desire to get a divorce, so that (according to our marriage law) not to pay child support and to have the opportunity to marry again in the state of New York. He stubbornly denied the validity of my guess, but his denials were accompanied by an exaggerated emotional reaction that showed clear signs of arousal, which he tried to cover with a laugh that only strengthened my suspicions. To the call to tell the truth in the interests of science, he replied: "If you are not going to accuse me of lying, you must believe me that I have never been married, and therefore your psychoanalytic interpretation is wrong." And he added that a person paying attention to all sorts of trivialities is positively dangerous. Then he suddenly remembered that he had an appointment, and left us.
However, Dr. Frink and I remained convinced that my interpretation of his reservation was correct, and I decided to confirm or deny it by conducting a further investigation. A few days later I visited a neighbor, an old friend of Dr. R., who was able to confirm my guess in all details. The divorce process took place a few weeks ago, and the nurse was brought in as a correspondent ^[62] .
Suppression may be intentional if the speaker lies deliberately, but Freud was more interested in cases where the speaker is not aware of the repression. Having made a reservation, he can understand what was suppressed, but he may not pay any attention to this.
The verifier must be careful, since not every reservation is evidence of deception. Gives a reservation false or not, can usually be determined by context. The verifier should also try to avoid another common mistake and consider everyone who does not make reservations true. Many lie at all without making a reservation. Freud does not explain why reservations do not always accompany lies. In addition, there is a temptation to believe that reservations occur when a liar unconsciously wants to be caught, probably feeling guilty for his lies. Dr. R., of course, felt guilty about himself, deceiving his respectable colleague. But so far there have been no studies (and even almost no assumptions have been made) that would explain why some kind of lie is issued with reservations, and some kind is not.
Tirades - this is the third way that the liars give themselves. Tirade is different from the reservation. Here not one or two words but usually the whole phrase are a miss. Information does not slip, but flows. Emotion “bears” a liar, and he doesn’t even immediately realize the consequences of his revelations. Remaining cold-blooded, the liar would not allow such information leakage. It is the pressure of an overwhelming emotion — madness, horror, fear, or grief — forces a liar to impersonate.
Tom Brokaw, the host of the Today Show program on television, described a fourth way to detect deception by external signs. “Most of the signs that I pay attention to are not physical, but verbal. I am not looking in the face of a person for signs that he is lying. I am interested in evasive answers or sophisticated dodge ” ^[63] .
Separate studies of the psychology of lies confirm Brokaw’s suspicions; according to them, some people, when they lie, do not give direct answers, are elusive, or provide more information than is required. Other studies have shown just the opposite: most people are too cunning to be evasive and avoid direct answers ^[64] .
Tom Brokaw may not notice such liars. And even greater here is the risk of incorrect assessment of the truthful person, whose speech turned out to be evasive or complete evasion. Some people always say that. In their case, this is not a sign of lies, it is just their usual manner of speaking. The difficulty lies in the fact that any manifestations, in most cases clearly indicating deception, for some people may be just a part of their normal behavior. I will call the possibility of incorrect assessment of such people a trap Brokaw. The verifier can always fall into this trap, especially if he is unfamiliar with the suspect and does not know his typical behavior. Ways to avoid the Brokaw trap will be discussed in Chapter 5, Basic Errors and Precautions.
No other sources of information leakage and signs of deception, manifested in human speech, have been discovered so far. I suspect that more and not find. As I said above, it is easiest to hide something or distort the truth with the help of words, although mistakes do happen, mainly due to carelessness - reservations, tirades, as well as evasive answers or dodge.