On paper, the candidate seems wonderful, and when you bring them in for an interview, things go great … at first. But as the conversation goes on, your gut instinct tells you something is off. Maybe they’re a little too polished. Maybe there are holes in their story. But for whatever reason, you start to suspect that they aren’t being entirely honest.
Or maybe it’s your teenager. You asked them about their night out, and the overly casual way they tossed back a reply suggests to you they’re hiding something. Or it could be a salesperson whose product seems perfect but whose pitch leaves you suspicious they’re leaving something out.
When you’re confronted with someone whom you suspect is telling a lie, how should you respond?
It’s a scenario almost everyone runs into in life. But there’s one profession where the whole job revolves around assessing people’s honesty and nudging them to confess when they’re lying—detectives. One recently revealed what more than a decade of questioning suspects taught him about the best way to nudge liars to reveal the truth.
What you shouldn’t do
Folks whose entire professional lives don’t revolve around sniffing out liars usually respond to suspected deceit in one of a handful of ways, according to Joshua Mason, a detective and 13-year police force veteran who shares his experience on Medium.
Naturally enough, many people get angry and call out the suspected liar. That might be emotionally satisfying, but it’s unlikely to get you any closer to the truth.
“The conversation turns hostile, focusing on your accusation. The other person now has a far easier problem to manage—your tone, your evidence, your motives for bringing it up,” Mason explains. Now you’re talking about your “paranoia” or “lack of trust,” and that’s not going to reveal anything.
In other cases, people sense a potentially embarrassing inconsistency on the part of the other person and try to smooth over the awkwardness. They might throw the other person a conversational lifeline or chatter away to avoid the topic. If you’re hoping to avoid a scene during cocktail party chitchat, that’s fine. But it won’t help you discover the truth.
You might also think you can rely on body language cues to be sure. But research suggests that commonly cited tells like shifty eyes are unreliable. Mostly, they just indicate anxiety. People can be anxious for many reasons. A candidate might be fidgety because they really want the job, not because they’re lying to you.
If you actually want a liar to reveal the truth, Mason instead recommends a simple, if counterintuitive, three-step plan. It demands patience and self-control. But it’s also your best bet for getting someone you suspect of lying to actually reveal the truth.
1. Label what you see.
Rather than making an accusation, name what you’re observing in as neutral a way as possible. This might sound something like, “I’m sensing there is more to this story,” or “You seem a little uncomfortable.”
“What you are doing is giving the other person a door. Not a trap, not a test—a door. You state an observation, and now they have a choice. They can walk through it or close it. Either response tells you something useful,” Mason explains.
His experience as an investigator indicates those “who have something to hide almost always walk through it, because the alternative [letting your observation sit unanswered] is more uncomfortable than explaining themselves.”
2. Ask “what” questions.
If the person walks through the door and begins to offer more information, your goal is to keep them talking. The way to do that, according to Mason, is to ask a specific type of question: “what, not why.”
What happened next? What were you thinking at that point? What did you do when she said that?
These types of questions come across as collaborative and non-threatening. They also require “the other person to come up with new information rather than defend old information. And generating new information under stress is where inconsistencies begin to surface,” Mason writes.
3. “Let the truth feel heavy.”
The final move in this three-part method for spotting a liar might feel the most counterintuitive. If you see someone tying themselves in knots of inconsistent explanations, it’s tempting to literally or figuratively call out, “Gotcha!” But trained investigators know this isn’t the most effective move. It’s far better to let the other party stew in the awkwardness of their dishonesty, even if that feels unnatural or unkind to you.
“Hiding deception is taxing. Keeping a false account straight while monitoring another person’s reactions and suppressing the truth isn’t sustainable. The longer someone carries a lie, the heavier it becomes,” Mason explains. “Make them carry it. Do not reassure. Do not summarize what they’ve told you in a way that makes the story feel resolved. Do not move to the next topic.”
Will that lead to a tearful confession? Only on Law & Order. In real life, people will probably just sort of sigh and start talking about the thing they were avoiding. Or they’ll descend into obvious, ridiculous falsehoods that make it absolutely plain they’ve been dishonest. Either way, you’ll end the conversation with a far clearer picture of what’s really going on than when you started it.
Psychology agrees
Does this method always work? Of course not. Some people are stubborn, prideful, or downright delusional. They’ll never veer from their story no matter how clear it becomes that no one in the room believes a word they’re saying. But Mason says this procedure is your best bet for uncovering the truth.
That recommendation is based on his personal experience. But it struck me reading his advice that it also aligns with recent research on how to spot a liar. Psychologists have developed and tested a procedure for uncovering dishonesty known as the asymmetric information management technique.
It focuses on encouraging suspected liars to provide more detailed information—the same goal as with Mason’s recommended “what” questions. Those who are innocent happily provide as much detail as possible. The guilty struggle to evade the request or get tripped up in fictional specifics, revealing themselves in the process.
“At its core, it is designed to provide suspects with a clear means to demonstrate their innocence or guilt to investigators by providing detailed information,” psychologist Cody Porter, one of the method’s creators, explained on The Conversation.
Entrepreneurs might also be intrigued to know that Mason’s approach to suspected liars is very similar to Elon Musk’s favorite interview technique. The SpaceX and Tesla boss has spoken about how he probes for more nitty-gritty details of a candidate’s work experience to evaluate whether they’re being entirely candid.
“The people who really solved the problem, they know exactly how they solved it, they know the little details,” Musk explained.
Try it out
So, the next time you sense something fishy in a job interview or on a first date and want to get to the bottom of the potential deception, try to suppress your instinct to get angry, look for tells, or paper over the problem. Your best bet, according to a law enforcement veteran, the latest psychological research, and a controversial entrepreneur, is to invite the other party to get into specifics and see if they tie themselves in knots.
Unlike other approaches, luring a liar deeper into their web of deception won’t cause them to get defensive or accuse you of a lack of faith. Instead, they might just get so tangled up in their lies that their false front collapses under its own weight.
This method demands a degree of emotional control. But if you really want the truth, this is probably your best way of getting it.
—Jessica Stillman
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
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This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com.
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