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如 何 识 别 谎 言

2017-02-08戴维罗布森任笑川

英语世界 2017年1期
关键词:说谎者莱文谎言

文/戴维·罗布森 译/任笑川

如 何 识 别 谎 言

文/戴维·罗布森 译/任笑川

Forget body language or eye movements. There are much better ways to identify the deceitful.别管什么肢体语言或眼睛活动了,识别说谎者有更好的招数。

T homas Ormerod’s team of security of fi cers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans. Ormerod had planted a handful of people arriving at security with a false history, and a madeup future—and his team had to guess who they were. In fact, just one in 1000 of the people they interviewed would be deceiving them. Identifying the liar should have been about as easy as fi nding a needle in a haystack.

托马斯·奥默罗德的安检团队面临一个似乎无法完成的任务。在欧洲各地的机场,他们的任务是询问旅客的过往经历和旅行计划。奥默罗德特意安排了几个人过安检时提供虚假经历和虚构计划,而他的团队必须找出这些人。事实上,编造谎言的只占受询者的千分之一。识别哪个人说谎就像大海捞针一样难。

[2]那么,他们如何识别谎言呢?一个办法大概是关注对方的肢体语言或眼睛活动吧?这个主意很糟糕。一项项研究已经表明,即使是训练有素的警官,通过观察肢体语言和面部表情来测谎,基本上跟碰运气差不多。根据一项研究,2万人中仅有50人的判断准确率超过80%。绝大多数人的判断就像抛硬币。

[2] So, what did they do? One option would be to focus on body language or eye movements, right? It would have been a bad idea. Study after study has found that attempts—even by trained police of fi cers—to read lies from body language and facial expressions aremore often little better than chance. According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just fl ip a coin.

[3] Ormerod’s team tried something different—and managed to identify the fake passengers in the vast majority of cases. Their secret? To throw away many of the accepted cues to deception and start anew with some startlingly straightforward techniques.

[3]奥默罗德的团队尝试了新办法,并在茫茫人海中成功找出了假旅客。他们的秘诀是什么?那就是抛掉许多广为人知的欺骗信号,而采用一些相当直接的全新的技术手段。

[4] Over the last few years, deception research has been plagued by disappointing results. Most previous work had focused on reading a liar’s intentions via their body language or from their face—blushing cheeks, a nervous laugh, darting eyes. Even if we think we have a poker face, we might still give away tiny flickers of movement known as “microexpressions” that might give the game away, they claimed.

[4]过去几年,骗术研究的结果一直令人失望。先前绝大多数的研究集中于通过身体语言或面部变化——脸颊发红,笑声发紧,眼球快速转动等信号——来识别说谎者的动机。研究者声称,即使我们自认长着一副扑克脸,还是会有细微的下意识动作,即所谓的“微表情”,这些表情可能暴露骗局。

[5]然而,心理学家越仔细观察,那些原本可靠的信号就越飘忽不定。问题就在于人类行为模式的千变万化。因为熟识对方,你也许能够根据其面部肌肉抽搐来判定对方是否诚实,但其他人的表现可能截然不同;身体语言没有通用的解读法。萨塞克斯大学的奥默罗德认为:“没有什么与欺骗总是对应一致的信号。我会发出紧张的笑声,其他人会变得更严肃,有些人会寻求目光交流,也有人会避免目光接触。”

[5] Yet the more psychologists looked, the more elusive any reliable cues appeared to be. The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour. With familiarity, you might be able to spot someone’s tics whenever they are telling the truth, but others will probably act very differently; there is no universal dictionary of body language.“There are no consistent signs thatalways arise alongside deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of Sussex. “I giggle nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some avoid it.”

[6] Clearly, a new method is needed. But given some of the dismal results from the lab, what should it be? Ormerod’s answer was disarmingly simple: shift the focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble.

[6]显然,这需要新方法。但是,鉴于实验室得出的一些结果令人灰心,到底什么方法有效呢?奥默罗德的答案非常简单,解人疑惑:把关注点从微妙的小动作转移到实际的言语上,慢慢探寻正确的压力点,最终让骗子的防御前线崩塌。

[7] Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit:

● Use open questions. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become entrapped in their own web of deceit.

● Employ the element of surprise. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load”—such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time—techniques that make it harder for them to maintain their façade.

[7]奥默罗德和来自伍尔弗汉普顿大学的同事科拉尔·丹多确定了一系列会话原则,这些原则应该可以提高识别谎言的机率:

●采用开放式问题。这会迫使撒谎者不断扩展他们的故事,直到陷入自己编织的谎言网里不能自拔。

●运用突然袭击。调查者要设法增加说谎者的“认知负荷”——比如问一些他们无法预料、可能略带迷惑性的问题,或者要求他们倒叙某件事——这些技巧会让他们很难维持假象。

●留意可以验证的小细节。如果乘客说他们在牛津大学上班,那就问问他们上班的路径。不过,如果发现确凿的矛盾之处,也不要立刻揭穿——最好让他们越说越自信,随口吐出更多谎言,而不要去纠正他们的错误。

● Watch for small, veri fi able details. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford, ask them to tell you about their journey to work. If youdo find a contradiction, though, don’t give yourself away—it’s better to allow the liar’s confidence to build as they rattle off more falsehoods, rather than correcting them.

● Observe changes in confidence. Watch carefully to see how a potential liar’s style changes when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like they are losing control.

●观察信心是否生变。仔细观察潜在撒谎者遭到怀疑时说话风格的变化:当他们觉得自己掌控对话时,说话会很啰嗦,但他们的舒适区域有限,如果感到自己将要失控,就会三缄其口。

[8] Ormerod openly admits his strategy might sound like common sense. “A friend said that you are trying to patent the art of conversation,” he says. But the results speak for themselves. The team prepared a handful of fake passengers, with realistic tickets and travel documents. They were given a week to prepare their story, and were then asked to line up with other, genuine passengers at airports across Europe. Of fi cers trained in Ormerod and Dando’s interviewing technique were more than 20 times more likely to detect these fake passengers than people using the suspicious signs, fi nding them 70% of the time.

[8]奥默罗德坦承他的策略可能听起来像常识。他说:“有个朋友跟我说,你是要为谈话艺术申请专利啊。”但是结果不言自明。团队预备了几个假乘客,他们有真的机票和旅行证件。他们有一周时间准备各自的故事,然后在欧洲各国的机场和真正的乘客一起排队等待检查。与靠识别可疑信号判断真假的同事相比,经过奥默罗德和丹多的面谈技巧培训的安检人员发现说谎乘客的机率高20多倍,达到70%的正确率。

说服的艺术

[9]莱文有关面谈技巧的实验证明同样有效。和奥默罗德一样,他相信,设计精妙的面谈以暴露说谎者言谈中的漏洞,要比试图识别肢体语言中的说慌信号好得多。最近,他设计了一个问答游戏,让大学生两人一组进行,每答对一题奖励现金五美元。学生们并不知道,他们的搭档其实是演员,当游戏主持人临时离开房间时,演员会提议快速偷看答案。有小部分学生听从了这个作弊的提议。

The art of persuasion

[9] Levine’s experiments have proven similarly powerful. Like Ormerod, he believes that clever interviews designed to reveal holes in a liar’s storyare far better than trying to identify tell-tale signs in body language. He recently set up a trivia game, in which undergraduates played in pairs for a cash prize of $5 for each correct answer they gave. Unknown to the students, their partners were actors, and when the game master temporarily left the room, the actor would suggest that they quickly peek at the answers to cheat on the game. A handful of the students took him up on the offer.

[10] Afterwards, the students were all questioned by real federal agents about whether or not they had cheated. Using tactical questions to probe their stories—without focusing on body language or other cues—they managed to find the cheaters with more than 90% accuracy. Importantly, a follow-up study found that even novices managed to achieve nearly 80% accuracy, simply by using the right, open-ended questions that asked, for instance, how their partner would tell the story.

[10]事后,学生们都接受了真正的联邦特工的质询,要求他们回答游戏时是否作弊。采用有策略的提问来探究他们的说法,而不是专注于肢体语言或其他信号,特工们识别作弊者的正确率高达90%以上。重要的是,一项后续研究发现,即使这一行的新人也能达到近80%的正确率,他们只不过采用了合适的开放式问题,例如问如果换作他们的搭档会如何讲述发生的事情。

[11]实际上,调查者常常说服作弊的人坦承他们的不当行为。莱文说:“专家们深谙此道。”他们的秘诀很简单,擅长说服艺术的高手都知道:他们在谈话一开始就会问学生,觉得自己有多诚实。仅仅让学生说出自己说的是实话,就可以引导学生接下来更加坦诚。莱文表示:“人们希望被看作诚实的人,这会让他们更加配合。即使不诚实的人在此之后也很难装出乐于合作的样子,所以基本就可以判断谁在说谎了。”

[11] Indeed, often the investigators persuaded the cheaters to openly admit their misdeed. “The experts were fabulously good at this,” says Levine. Their secret was a simple trick known to masters in the art of persuasion: they would open the conversation by asking the students how honest they were. Simply getting them to say they told the truth primed them to be morecandid later. “People want to think of being honest, and this ties them into being cooperative,” says Levine. “Even the people who weren’t honest had difficulty pretending to be cooperative [after this], so for the most part you could see who was faking it.”

[12] Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert detectives—but given the folklore surrounding body language, it’s worth emphasising just how powerful persuasion can be compared to the dubious science of body language. Despite their successes, Ormerod and Levine are both keen that others attempt to replicate and expand on their fi ndings, to make sure that they stand up in different situations.

[12]显然,一些经验丰富的侦探或许早已用上这些窍门了——但是关于肢体语言有许多民间说法,因而有必要强调,与不可靠的肢体语言相比,说服的效力巨大。尽管奥默罗德和莱文都取得了成功,他们仍然热切期望其他人尝试复制和拓展他们的研究结果,以确保那些结果在不同的场合都站得住脚。

[13] Although the techniques will primarily help law enforcement, the same principles might just help you hunt out the liars in your own life. “I do it with kids all the time,” Ormerod says. The main thing to remember is to keep an open mind and not to jump to early conclusions: just because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies.

[14] There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the truth will out.

[13]尽管这些技巧主要是帮助执法部门,但同样的原则也可以帮你找出周围的骗子。奥默罗德说:“我一直用这些方法和孩子们打交道。”重要的是记住,不抱成见,不过早下结论:仅仅因为某人表现有点紧张,或是回忆某个重要细节很费力,并不能表明他们作假。相反,应该寻找更普遍的矛盾之处。

[14]没有万无一失的测谎方法,但是运用一点点机智、智慧和说服技巧,就可以期待,真相终将大白。

(译者单位:青岛科技大学外国语学院)

The Best (and Worst) Ways to Spot a Liar

ByDavid Robson

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