By: Eric Fisher
BROOKLINE, Mass. (abc40) -- "Everybody lies in some respect." Perhaps those are pessimistic words from Private Investigator Jay Groob. But there may be truth to the fact that most people lie, sometimes on a daily basis.
"People get away with murder these days and don't care about lying. That's what I find." says Groob.
You can probably understand that Groob comes across a lot of liars. Owner of American Investigative Services in Brookline, it's his job to interrogate and interview possible suspects.
Groob spoke to abc40 about the techniques involved, and the long process of an interview (some of which can take hours). He says it begins with the setting.
"Normally you have to take them out of their environment, their comfort level" says Groob. That setting may be different for each person. It could be a hotel room, a boss's office, or a place they've never been. But to sniff out a lie, you don't want to interview a person in their own room or comfort zone. It's also helpful to find a room without distractions. No phones, nothing on the walls, and not too big.
There's also a fair amount of homework involved. Groob and his staff run background checks, learn a suspects' family dynamic, their living situation, their intelligence level, and their ethnic makeup. All of the variables can play a role in gauging a personality and tendencies.
The interview begins with a few control questions. "What's your name? Where do you live? Do you like baseball?" are all easy questions to answer. Groob reads the mannerisms that accompany the responses. Then they get to the meat of the interview.
Once Groob finds a change in the pitch of someone's voice, a shift of the eyes, hands rubbing together, or a change in posture; he'll focus in and attack with a series of questions designed to dig for answers.
They're all called micro-movements, slight "tells" of the body that can give a liar away. Groob says that by doing the background check, gauging someone's personality, and by watching all of these movements, they can catch a liar at least 70% of the time. When combined with a polygraph machine, it's nearly foolproof.
But there are some that believe in more specific tells. Joe Tecce, of Boston College, is one of those people. He's a professor at Boston College University, whose claim to fame is his ability to predict the outcome of presidential elections through eye-blink analysis.
"In the last 8 elections, the faster blinker during the debates always lost the election," says Tecce. The only exception to that rule was in 2000, when George Bush lost the popular vote but won in the electoral college. Bush was a faster blinker than contender Al Gore.
Tecce has made a living off of his research, which concentrates primarily on political figures. He's clocked John McCain at 104 blinks per minute, and Bob Dole at a whopping 180 blinks per minute (both election losers). The normal rate for an average person is in the 30-50 blink per minute range.
"Blink rates are typically situation ally driven. The more stressful, the faster they blink," says Tecce.
Tecce believes that blinking is a more fail-proof method for lie detection because it's hard to train yourself to control your blinking. He says you can slow the rate for a while, but once you get comfortable or engaged in a conversation you slip back to old habits and tells.
There are also the 3 R's used to find truth, according to Tecce. Reliability, redundancy, and relevance are all factors to look for. Reliability refers to whether or not a person contradicts themselves in a line of questioning. If a person repeats themselves for effect, or says the same thing a number of times in an interview, it can also be seen as a sign of a lie.
And finally, there's relevance. If a suspect strays for the topic, or begins to talk about something unrelated, it's a good sign that they're avoiding the subject and are uncomfortable.
In the end there are a number of tools that can be used to find out whether a person is genuine. The hard part is putting them all to work at once, something we rarely do in everyday conversation.
