Right now, one of the books I am reading is “Get Anyone to do Anything” by David J. Lieberman.
This book is filled with many techniques you can use in difficult situations to get other people to do what you need them to do.
His methods are based on many years of research into human behavior. He has written a previous book on how to tell when people are lying to you.
I will just briefly present some of his ideas on how to tell whether or not another person is telling you the truth. This is a problem we all face from time to time, so it is helpful to have a few tips.
If you think his advice is useful, you may wish to check out more about David J Lieberman’s other books on human behavior. They are fun and easy to read, and contain a lot of practical, useful information.
You might get the suspicion that the other person is not telling you the truth. Sometimes we feel this suspicion because we are naturally suspicious and have a hard time trusting anybody. But sometimes we are suspicious because we sense that something is wrong, and that the other person is lying to us.
How can we tell when someone is lying to us about such a matter? Usually, when we try to ask questions of a person who has decided to lie to us, they will continue sticking to their story.
David Lieberman suggests that sometimes we can flush out a lie by introducing a made up “fact” related to the other person’s story. Make the “fact” you introduce sound like a plausible story. That means, it sounds as if it could have really happened, but it didn’t. Then watch how the other person reacts.
For example, if the other person says “I was at the Royal Theater for the six o’clock movie” you can say, “I heard on the news there was a big accident outside the Royal Theater just before six.”
If the person was really there, he will immediately tell you, “No, there wasn’t an accident” and will appear quite calm about it.
However, if they weren’t really there, they are likely to become flustered and confused, because they don’t know what to say next. They might say something like “Oh, right, well, that certainly was a bad accident.” If they seem to hesitate and act suspiciously, this will confirm to you that they weren’t really there, because they are trying to come up with another made up story.
I’m not a big fan of this technique because I don’t believe in trying to catch a liar by becoming a liar, but sometimes we feel desperate to know whether or not someone is lying to us about something important, and this kind of technique can at least let us know what kind of situation we are dealing with.
How to Tell is a Person is Trying to Bluff You
Bluffing is a word that means someone is pretending to be confident when they are in a difficult situation and they are trying to get away with something. They want desperately to manipulate you into believing they are confident and have a lot of power and advantage when really they don’t.
They are hoping that if they pretend to be confident, you will be fooled and back away or give in.
For example, in a game of playing cards, especially when betting is involved, a person who has a terrible handful of cards will often bluff. He will try to act very confident., as if he actually had very good cards in his hand.
By this show of confidence, he tries to intimidate the other card players into backing down so he can win. So, he will try to look confident and happy as he looks around the table.
And often, this technique will work, because the other players will believe, “If he is acting so confident, he must have good cards. I should just give up now, before I lose too much.”
But as David Lieberman points out, if a person truly had a handful of very good cards, he would not be trying to act confident. Why? Because he has no real need to try to make the other players back down.
A person who truly has a good hand of cards would probably try to act quite neutral so others couldn’t guess that he was happy. Or he might even decide to pretend he is worried and anxious to cover up the fact that his cards are actually very good.
A player only needs to put on a show of confidence when his hand is quite poor.
So very often, a show of confidence is actually a sign that a person is bluffing. Because a person who truly has a powerful advantage doesn’t need to try to act confident.
All people who are bluffing have one thing in common – they want you to think that they have some powerful advantage so they try to convey this by acting confident.
Very often, they try too hard. Remember, that when a person is truly confident of their position or their power, they don’t need to try too hard to convince you they are confident.
