Sunday, May 06, 2007

HOW TO SPOT A LIE- #1

TRUTHFUL PATTERN

GENERAL-SPECIFIC-GENERAL

PATTERN INDICATING DECEIT

SPECIFIC-GENERAL-SPECIFIC

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Give us an example Dow - I'm very interested.
Loved the Samson reflection by the way - I've wondered if he wasn't blessed with an Edenic relationship with animals similar to what Noah must have been given.

barefootkangaroo said...

For example:

A neighbors window was broken and you suspect that it was one of your kids that did it. You know they were playing around the neighbors house around the time the window was broken- 5:00pm.

You ask the first kid to tell you what they did with their afternoon and they tell you, "We went over to Kenny's house and we hung out there for a long time because he just got a new video game and also because they have a puppy. It's a black lab-mix and really nice. We played video games and ate popcorn until maybe four o'clock. Then we just kind of fooled around until dinner and then we came home. Oh yeah, on the way home I found a dollar bill on the sidewalk outside Target and I bought an almond joy with it."

The way he recounted the evening's events indicate deliberate omission. The vague statement "just fooled around" is sandwiched between detail-rich language. The kid is trying to gloss over the part of the afternoon where the "bad thing" happened and is over compensating on detail in the rest of the account in the hope that the hole in the account will not be noticed. He doesn't want to lie overtly so he couches the omission between unnecessary detail. A truthful response would be indicated by an even amount of detail or a great deal of specificity centered on the exact time or event in question.