A Simple Strategy You Can Use to Tell If Someone is Lying to You
It’s much more difficult to tell a lie in reverse.
One of the most jarring memories from my teen years is when my best friend was being cheated on by her boyfriend. The whole time, he made her feel like she was the distrustful, unloyal, misbehaving one. Night after night, he’d have this or that story about what he’d been up to, why he hadn’t come to that study session, why he was late to dates.
Eventually, she caught him out almost by accident: he told her a long and convoluted tale of being stopped at a long traffic light, then remembering he had to pick something up from the store, then being called by his mom. Later, she asked him an irrelevant question about what his mom had asked him to pick up from the store, and he told her it was bread.
When she told me about it later in one of our long “am I crazy or am I right to be suspicious” conversations, we both realized it at the same time: the stories didn’t match up. The order of events he told her had altered. And we had unwittingly stumbled across one of the easiest strategies to determine if someone is lying to you: ask them to tell you the story, but in the reverse order.
