Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars | 4,066 ratings

Price: 12.24

Last update: 07-08-2024


Top reviews from the United States

John M. Ford
5.0 out of 5 stars "Don't Practice on Your Significant Other"
Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2012
This book's authors have many years of experience interviewing CIA assets, CIA employees, and a variety of ordinary people in non-CIA settings. Their specialty is in determining when someone is lying. And they are good at it. This skill in detecting deception has done a lot of good, helping their clients make better decisions about hiring the right new employee, trusting the right baby sitter, and prosecuting the person who really "did it." Sometimes the skills bring pain, making clear that the waiting doctor's politeness covers bad news or that a spouse isn't really joking about "her boyfriend." Still, it's better to know, isn't it?

Detecting deception isn't magic and it isn't infallible. But it is possible to become better at it than most of us are now. The book identifies several barriers to accurately detecting deception. We expect most people to tell the truth, we ask the wrong questions, and we look for the wrong "tells" in other people's behavior. And we try to watch everything they do instead of focusing on a small number of reliable indicators.

Such reliable indicators of deception include certain kinds of verbal hesitations and evasions as well as specific body movements of which a deceiver is largely unaware. Readers learn to ask questions that require different mental processing from guilty versus innocent suspects. One technique is to ask questions a good guy will answer with an immediate--and perhaps angry--"No!" while the bad guy will need to give a longer, more carefully worded response. We watch for deception indicators that begin in the first five seconds after a question. And we look for clusters of indicators rather than for single actions. There is more to it, of course, but this is the core methodology the book presents. It's good stuff. And it's learnable.

I attended a training session conducted by the authors' company (QVerity, in partnership with hemsleyfraser) this week. I had listened to roughly three-quarters of the audiobook during a long car ride the day before. Based on what I learned from the book I was able to do well in the video pre-test, successfully distinguishing a lying suspect from the four who told the truth. Almost everyone was also able to do this after two hours of training. So it seems to me that the book is nearly as valuable as being taught these skills by the authors themselves. It is a well-written, fascinating book on a very useful topic. I highly recommend it.

A final comment. The book closes with a warning to use these skills only for good. And to not practice them on our significant others. Apparently catching your spouse in all of those little white lies can put unnecessary stress on the relationship. I may have made a variation of this error by giving my wife a copy of the book and inviting her along to the training. Not sure that was such a good idea. We'll see.
jennifer anne pocurull
5.0 out of 5 stars Great for recruiters & business owners
Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2019
This is long but it I am so grateful and want to give my recent triumph with the help of this book....I currently own a medical spa. Our biggest challenge is hiring hard working, honest people, passionate about the business. Statistically we are average with the number of good hires but that is not a good thing when statistics say only 51% last more than 12 mos. Especially for lower level jobs being less. Many people just want a paycheck or want free services and could care less about helping customers and learning about aesthetics or medicine. Within the first few chapters I had already found ways of asking questions in interviews that when applied were astounding in getting the right response.
A good example was when I was interviewing a woman whom I felt had amazing qualifications for my Front Desk Manager’s position. She had owned her own pet salon for over 17 years but sold it and went to work for Pet Smart. I thought that seemed a little strange so asked her why? She naturally had a response that she wanted to move to Texas, originally being from Wisconsin which was horribly cold and owning a business was just too stressful. I wanted to know more as this didn’t seem like the mentality of a successful business owner so I asked her what kind of paycheck she wrote herself each year. Her response was “my gross income last year was $80k, which I am so proud of.” 1) She did not answer the question. 2) “which I am proud of.” Is used to further convince me she was making good money.” Luckily as a business owner I know it probably takes at least $80.K just to run a business. But this was not enough for me to disqualify her and author Russell Targ says just 1 red flag is not enough, so after a few more positive type questions I asked another. ‘Tell me about a time you didn’t get along with a co-worker’. I’m paraphrasing because she gave an overly long explanation of events which in-and of itself is a red flag but within the overly verbose statement She stated “they get annoyed with me” but didn’t tell me what “they” get annoyed with. When I asked what ‘they get annoyed with’ she minimized a situation where she had the flu 4 days and the next day she went to an already committed dentist appointment to get her tooth pulled and was in too much pain so again had to call in sick. I was a bit suspicious at this point as to why her boss would be annoyed with this if she was such a great employee since both those explanations seemed reasonable. So I later in the interview snuck in an “assumptive question” about her being late to which she confessed several additional times having been late but of course had plausible excuses. I was even more suspicious at this point about her integrity as an employee so asked the question a different way, ‘tell me a time you had a challenging client’ to which she told me another very verbose story about “a client who brought in a badly matted dog and when after shaving it had lots of bruising etc. the lady gave a terrible rating.” I tried not to sound judgmental so I commiserated with her on that as a business owner how awful that must have felt. We exchanged some giggles and at this point I felt she really was ready to open up to me. I then asked her to ‘describe a bad day at work’ where she gave another story with many excuses why where she had ripped a dog’s ear by accident, the police and media was called accusing her of animal abuse, she was taken to court and her name was smeared in this small town which was hard to recover from.???? Now I am a bit alarmed but the old me is wanting to believe her that it wasn’t her fault so Finally, I wrapped up after many other positive exchanges I asked ‘if I were to call her employer what derogatory things might they say about her’ to which she replied “they don’t like the way I do things which of course with further questioning her reply was to minimize all of their complaints.” Now, here is where I used to get tripped up. I usually have a phone interview that lasts about an hour or more before setting up face-to-face interview and that is how this one was. I as usual wanting to believe the best in everybody was mostly paying attention to the many positive and outstanding things she had to say and want to believe her excuses so immediately set up a face-to-face interview. But this time I did something differently after hanging up with her. I paid really close attention to the “cluster” of suspicious things she mentioned and by then it hit me like a ton of bricks. In every bad hire I have ever made they had answers like this woman where they minimized, evaded the questions, or had great excuses. Now while we all have great excuses from time to time the book says to pay attention to multiples. Needless to say I politely cancelled the interview. After reading this book the signs were as clear as day.
I am happy to say I am now able to cut my phone interviews down to just 20-30 minutes even shorter when I see these “cluster” as the hook puts it.
JT
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read that dispels body language myths
Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2018
I wasn't sure what to expect with this book. I purchased it on a lark after spying it (see what I did there?) in a list Amazon presented me with books I might be interested in reading. I'm always interested in all kinds of aspects of communication from storytelling to persuasion techniques to negotiation tactics, and I'd seen similar titles on the topics of lying and truth evaluation in the past.

I decided to buy this title because of the intelligence agency background of the authors, and they described their method of detecting deception as a relatively simple and straightforward one. They weren't lying (see what I did there?).

The book provides clear, real-world examples of subjects who've been less than truthful when questioned about a variety of topics, and for me, those examples went a long way toward crystallizing the specific points being made about the methodology the authors have developed.

As the book points out, there's no such thing as a lie detector, and I doubt most who read this will ever become as adept at deception detecting as the authors are, but the book does provide interesting insights into human nature and how people can give themselves away when they aren't being truthful. I'd say the book is full of solid concepts to keep in mind as you go about your daily life interacting with other people in all kinds of different situations where truth is critical.

You won't become a human lie detector, and you won't be able to observe someone's body language and determine whether or not someone is being truthful (despite what some TV pundits claim they can do – they can't). Just keep the book's methodology in mind and be mindful when you see some of the behaviors discussed.
Daniel Garcia
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommend
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2024
Great read!

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