We all carry a portable lie detector with us at all times — it’s called ears. According to this TED lesson, we can tell if someone is lying just by analysing their language. This technique, called linguistic text analysis, is based on the difference between how we structure sentences in invented and in true stories.
We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day. And although we’ve spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect these lies by tracking physiological changes in their tellers, these methods have proved unreliable. Is there a more direct approach? Noah Zandan uses some famous examples of lying to illustrate how we might use communications science to analyze the lies themselves.
The full lesson is available on the TED website. Watch the video below, test it out on your friends, and let us know if you have any success.