tl:dr

Even the best poker players have "tells" that give away when they're bluffing with a weak hand. Scientists who commit fraud have similar, but even more subtle, tells, and a pair of Stanford researchers have cracked the writing patterns of scientists who attempt to pass along falsified data.

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Body

https://archive.is/95RT0

There is a fair amount of research dedicated to understanding the ways liars lie. Studies have shown that liars generally tend to express more negative emotion terms and use fewer first-person pronouns. Fraudulent financial reports typically display higher levels of linguistic obfuscation – phrasing that is meant to distract from or conceal the fake data – than accurate reports.

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Negative Emotions : The person attempting to deceive you will try to activate your emotional "reptilian" brain so that your intellectual functions are suspended. They do this with strong emotions directing blame away from themselves and towards something else.

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Fewer First-Person Pronouns : Since blame is being directed away from themselves you never hear the person taking responsibility for their actions. An honest person tends to take pride in what they do, so you generally sense an innocence when someone is describing (usually to excess) their own accomplishments. When someone is creating a deception they stop talking about themselves.

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Obfuscation : This one has personal relevance to me. When I was in banking and getting into fraud investigations we used to joke about how the crimes get committed. We would joke:

"Pull the background over the foreground and the facts underground !"

Obfuscation is where you turn something very simple into something complicated. This technique works as a deception because no one can figure out what you did.

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Conclusion : Deception has three main elements.

Note: Women do this so easily and unconsciously that it's worth understanding how deception is structured in a universal sense.

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Update : "Tells" are a byproduct of the structured lie. So we can examine the structural aspects or attempt to read body language. If your mind is focused on the magician you might miss his/her trick, so if you instead watch for structure it then alerts you to follow with observing body language. If the two match (both suggesting a deception) then you are probably reading it correctly.

The structure should be what tips you off to the deception... then the "tells" simply strengthen the evidence. Structure is an objective reference point, but "tells" are picked up through your focusing on some subtle movement and can be hidden if the deceiver is good at it.

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Example :

When a woman blames someone else you should consider her motives and watch her "tells". If her story gets complicated you need to become more skeptical. If she gets overly emotion this should make you double your skepticism.

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