Lie Detecting 101: A Comprehensive Course in Spotting Lies and Detecting Deceit

This is a great book and super easy to read. It is very informative but not complicated. I like that the end of each chapter has a summary much like a text book - but soo much easier to read.

How many of us have ever had to determine whether or not someone was lying?In everyday life, we deal with coworkers, children, salesmen, neighbors. There are occupations (police, teachers, etc.) who may have to converse with potential liars on a daily basis. Possessing a system that can help you separate lies from the truth would be invaluable, and that is what Dr. David Craig offers with this book. Dr. Craig has over 20 years of criminological experience and has dedicated the same amount of time to researching deception and deception detection. One couldn't ask for a better trainer.The book is laid out in an easy-to-understand manner. Part One deals with understanding lies, providing background explaining why people lie and how often. Part Two contains the meat of the book, and goes into great detail how a person can detect lies. Rather than rely solely on descriptions, Dr. Craig has included numerous colored pictures of postures and facial expressions that depict exactly what he is talking about.I enjoyed many of the author's explanations enlightening. For instance, Dr. Craig describes the brain as divvying up $100 to fund the different processes that go on when someone lies. Most of it (he used $40) is used cognitively, as liars must come up with statements that are believable. If we question a liar, that liar must reprocess and come up with more lies based on the initial statements. This means more of that $100 must be diverted to thinking about what to say. In normal terms, as the brain needs to concentrate on new lies that mesh with the old one, the liar loses control over some of the automatic mechanisms of his body and signs of lying emerge -- breaking eye contact, covering the face, defensive postures, and so on.The last part of the book contain a number of resources: summaries of information from the chapters, a reference list of lying signs, a lying signs image reference guide, and handy hints sections for parents, teachers, and recruiters. Finally, Dr. Craig has included an impressive list of reference material to help back up his book. Throughout, the author cautions readers that hardly anyone can detect 100% of all the lies someone may tell, but with practice should be able to notice 70-80%.I have read other books on detecting lies, but never one that was as helpful and as easy to read as this one. Highly recommend to anyone who would like to increase their skills on detecting lies.

While this book gives a great perspective on lie detection, I found it lacking in more examples and scenarios of detecting if and/or when a person is lying. It talks about guilt and control questions, but no real examples or scenarios of such questions. I would love if there were a more in depth version of this book by its author. I suppose it left me wanting to know more. It's a general synopsis of how to begin the study of detecting lies. So, for readers who are interested in this particular subject, this is a good start. I'm grateful that it wasn't expensive to get a general overview.

I used these techniques to figure out who was responsible for stealing $500 from me, but it took me hindsight to understand, meaning that you have to practice if you expect to catch them as they speak. I only gave the book three stars because there was a lot of repetition so it got kinda' boring, though it may be that we need the repetition to learn it.

An easy read with several tips and strategies on lie detection. There are summaries to make it easy to review the material but even with them the author repeats himself frequently which is distracting.

Some of the information was hard for me to remember, but I am an older person and someone younger might not have this problem.

Saved it to review it over again. Very informative. I have a law enforcement background and use it often.

There are lies then there are lies. Gets you to see how we all lie to some degree or other.

I have the print as well as electronic edition of this book. It is quite readable and instructive.

I used this as a sort of user manual to see if it would help me to detect liars. Most of it was plenty of what you already know. I'll keep it as a reference book.

Like it...full of interesting info

Some good information with example for how to apply the techniques, but the same information was repeated several times. The repetition was not necessary, just made the book longer..

Not enough interesting material