How do you tell if a colleague or business associate is lying over the telephone or in a video conference? Help could be at hand, provided you know the person you are dealing with.
In a recent study, David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina, of Stanford's Graduate School of Business, examined deceptive discussions in almost 30,000 conference calls by CEOs and chief financial officers in the United States from 2003 to 2007.
The result? Bosses speak differently when they are lying. Among other traits, they tend to be vague and often make things sound more attractive than they really are.
But how about detecting whether people are lying in person or during virtual meetings or video conferencing?
The idea that we can discern the truth by observing body language is a common misconception. For example, looking for a particular facial twitch, or pattern of movement or speech, may not be helpful.
'There are no reliable methods of detecting if a person is lying or not,' says London-based business psychologist and coach Rob Yeung, an in-demand television personality on CNN and BBC.