What do you think most of your thoughts concern:  Yourself?  Others?  An ever-alternating mix of the two?

Our minds are like little machines that never stop running.  So we get used to the continual purring of the motor, virtually NEVER even realizing what it’s producing… or considering that we can affect the product. 

So I’ll ask you to consider this:  How much of your thought do you think is centered on control? 

And how much of that thought has to do with controlling others? 

Controlling others. 

Hold on—it’s not as sinister as it sounds:

-We want them to do something…

-We wish they hadn’t done something.  Or hadn’t said something…

-We hope they’ll make the decision we want them to make.  The list could go on.

Most of this thought, of course, is useless.  While thoughts of controlling the actions of others may consume a lot of our (unintentional) mental energy, the reality is that our control over them is usually pretty limited.

So while we’re spending all that time thinking about the decisions and actions of others, and how we’d like them to be different, we entirely ignore addressing the person we can control:  Ourself. 

In my last post of 2011 I wrote that all outcomes arrive at our feet through this simple, inarguable formula:  Thought, Decision, and Action.

Since everything we get in life—that we have a say in, anyway—begins with thought, wouldn’t it be smart to exercise maximum control over it?  Put another way, could it actually be detrimental NOT to control our thoughts?  Yes.   

The most elemental way to control our thoughts is simply through an awareness that at any given moment we’re navigating in one of two modes: 

1-Focus

or…

2-Distraction

If I’m focusing on a football game, I’m distracted from mowing the lawn.

If I’m focused on emails, I’m distracted from the project I need to finish.

If I’m focused on a problem, I’m may actually be distracted from its simple solution… or that it doesn’t have one.

How this relates to Time Management:  Despite all its myriad remedies, the real source of Time Management problems  goes back to the simple issue of Focus vs. Distraction.  We’re losing productivity simply because we’re in a state of focus on the ‘wrong’ thing… and distracted from the ‘right’ thing.

Way back in 2009 I wrote about the Myth of Multitasking.  Contrary to popular belief, multitasking is a losing proposition.  Why?  Because we’re focused and distracted at the same time!   By definition, spreading our attention over several subjects is:  Distraction. 

How Focus & Distraction relate to deception and conversational results:  In a typical conversation we tend to focus primarily on our own thoughts, while giving little attention to what’s being said:

-We’re offended at the words of the other person…

-We think they’re wrong…

-We’re thinking of what we’re going to say next (THE biggest distractor of all from what’s being said to us)

Deception is easy to pull off because…

1-The average person doesn’t know the true methods for spotting it, and

2-The average person doesn’t LISTEN. 

This second point is the most critical of the two; even a person who has limited knowledge of how to tell when someone is lying will still pick up on the more obvious signs… if he’ll just stifle the internal noise in his head and listen intently to the other person. 

So whether you want to be more productive with your time, or you’re interested in spotting deception when it comes your way, focus is THE prerequisite.

How to master Focus and Distraction:  Notice what you’re thinking about. 

Without even realizing it, are you falling prey to distraction… by allowing yourself to focus on something that doesn’t matter? 

Now that you’ve given this idea some thought, would agree that nearly all your results depend on this simple question, one that you can ask yourself in any moment of your day:  Am I focused… or distracted?

-jef

Have you ever accused another person of something?

If so, did you already know they were guilty—or were you still in the “investigation” stage of the matter?

Most importantly, did you notice their reaction… to the accusation?

Whether the subject is infidelity, money missing from the register, or a broken lamp in the living room, haven’t we all been in the position of dealing with someone who’s “done something“?

But did you know this:  In most cases, the reaction of the accused can be more revealing than the known evidence.

I might have played blog-hooky the last few months of 2011, but I was still keeping an eye on the news.  There were 3 major major news stories of that period, all had one thing in common, and as I watched each unfold I thought of how they might benefit you and your quest for finding spotting truth.

So here’s what each of these 3 stories have in common:  DENIAL.

1-Attorney General Eric Holder and the Fast and Furious investigation:

During a House hearing May 3, 2011, Congressman Darrell Issa asked Eric Holder how long he’d know about the secret program which allowed US guns into Mexico, one of which was used to kill a US border patrol agent: 

Issa:  “When did you first know about the program, officially I believe called ‘Fast and Furious’?  To the best of your knowledge, what date?”

Holder:  “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”

After the hearing documents were discovered that showed Holder was aware of the program in July, 2010, some 10 months earlier.

Issa’s question is poorly constructed, but we’ll leave that for another time.  Even so, it manages to get a revealing response from Holder—one that reveals his deception.  In fact, it comes down to ONE word in Holder’s response that gives him away. 

Can you guess what that word is?

2-Jerry Sandusky and Penn State molestation scandal:

After several weeks of relentless accusation in October, Sandusky decided to go public and make a statement.  News stories like the one linked to just above generously called it his “denial”… but it didn’t take Columbo to decipher the real story on this one.  Even novice observers considered it to have the feel of a confession:

Sandusky:  “I could say that I have done some of those things.  I have horsed around with kids I have showered after workouts.  I have hugged them and I have touched their legs without intent of sexual contact.”

This is called ‘bargaining’:  Conceding an incident, then immediately re-framing and minimizing it.  Experienced police interrogators have heard it a hundred times, the old, “I was there, but I didn’t shoot anybody” routine.  If you’ve read Conquering Deception, you already know the in-and-outs of recognizing this one.

When the reporter asked Sandusky about the time he was allegedly seen molesting a boy in a shower he said, “I would say that was false.”

“I would say that was false.”  Though most people would take this as a denial, it’s not one that indicates innocence.  It’s problematic on a couple levels, but let’s keep it simple again:  There’s ONE word that gives it away.

Do you know what it is? 

3-Herman Cain and the Sexual Harassment scandal:

By early November the second of two accusers had come forward, both alleging Cain sexually harassed them. 

Here’s an interview Cain did in late October; at the time, just one accuser had presented:

You probably found some interesting lines in this, here’s a couple that struck me:

:44  - “…it turned out to be baseless” is not “it was proven false”.

:58 - He refers to others who can vouch for his character, common for the guilty, similar to the “I wasn’t raised that way,” defense

2:10 - He allows that other accusations could come, but that they would be false

2:34 - He again refers to people who can attest to his character; in reality, no one can vouch absolutely for the private conduct of anyone, but this is another technique many use:  The invocation of character witnesses—who have yet to testify! 

The perceived provability of an accusation will affect the strength of the denial.  Like Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal, the initial accusations against Cain amounted to a matter of words, a case of ”he said, she said”, with no objective evidence of guilt.  A guilty person who believes an accusation can’t be proven will come more closely to giving a believable denial. 

Cain’s third accuser amounted to his own Blue Dress Moment; he knew there would be tangible proof of the long term relationship this woman alleged, and he was done.  The real “evidence” of this?  Candidates don’t drop out of races when allegations are truly false.

Truthful denials have certain traits, ones that can be used to craft a believable false denial.  Virtually no one knows how to do this, and had Herman called me I could have constructed a denial for him that would have worked.  Well, for a while, at least. 

Herman Cain did do an admirable job of denying the charges, but to my knowledge there’s one thing he never said in any of his denials; had he, it would have been a strong indicator of his truthfulness.    

Can you tell me what that is? 

Newt Gingrich addressed last week’s allegations from his ex-wife in a way that seems to have effectively extinguished the fire. 

What was his secret? 

Well, he used something that none of the above mentioned ever did:  Emotion.

A person who’s wrongfully accused, especially in a public forum, would understandably be upset, indignant, and passionate in proclaiming their innocence. 

So does this mean Newt is truthful when he denied these allegations?  How could we really know?  This one is still “he said, she said.”  And unless she’s got tape, it always will be.

We need to keep in mind, too, that verbal indicators aren’t final destinations—they’re just road signs on the path to truth. 

Hope there’s something here that makes you think… and something that might help you spot the truth in your conversations with others. 

-jef

Why?

Well, I could probably come up with a lot reasons (excuses) why I haven’t posted anything in so long, but there’s really just one.  It’s among the 3 below—which do you think it was? 

I’ve been:

1—Hitch hiking cross-continent

2—In and out of rehab

3—Working a lot… and procrastinating

If you guessed no. 3, congratulations (and thanks).  And you should know it’s not the ‘working a lot’ part that’s been my problem, it’s been the ‘procrastination’.  I have a problem with it.  If you struggle with it sometimes too, know that we’re not alone.  Everyone does… or so we hope, at least.

Though I still haven’t mastered it, I’ve thought a lot about procrastination over a long period of time, and I’m always left with 2 inescapable conclusions:

1—Procrastination is a time management problem.  Other than while sleeping, it’s rare that we’re doing absolutely NOTHING.  We’re usually doing SOMETHING—just not what we need to be doing.  We’re choosing to spend our time on the ‘wrong’ things.    

So the next one stems from this…

2—Procrastination isn’t just a matter of time management; it’s a Decision-making problem. 

Since we’re always doing SOMETHING, when we procrastinate we’re simply not DECIDING to do what we need to do:  Putting it off.  Thinking some more about it (not always a bad thing).  Dreading it.  Worrying about it.  And not DEALING with it.

But I came to a 3rd revelation, too:  To overcome procrastination, Decision isn’t enough.  We have to take ACTION. 

So as I’m writing this to you, it occurs to me that EVERY result we get in life (the ones that we have a say in, at least) comes from this simple process:  Thought, Decision, and Action. 

So the formula is:  Thought + Decision + Action = Outcome.

And the first 2 aren’t enough.  If we don’t actively participate and take control of all 3 of these, we don’t get the result we want.  Keep in mind also that when don’t take charge of Though, Decision, and Action, there will still BE an outcome.  But it will be a default result, and not necessarily the one we wanted.

With New Year’s Day coming tomorrow, the whole ’Resolution’ thing came to mind again.  You know from my post  one year ago that I think they’re a waste.   

When we make a New Year’s Resolution, we’re really pledging to address our procrastination, aren’t we?  The issue we want to ‘fix’ isn’t new, just one we haven’t taken Action on yet.  

The first 2 pieces of the recipe are the easiest:  Thought, and Decision.  And making a resolution makes us feel better, as if we’re making progress on something that’s been an obstacle.  But that decision (or any other) is useless if we don’t follow through with the most critical ingredient in the recipe:  ACTION.

I’m working outside right now, it’s sunny and 72, and our son asked me to take him to the park an hour and a half ago—just minutes after I had decided to finally sit down and write a new post.  It made me stop and reconsider getting some work done… taking Action.  I have a hard time turning down a request like that, you understand.    My wife didn’t help, either.  “It is a holiday,” she said to me. 

But there’s always something to keep me from doing what I need to do.  And sometimes I just have to set everything aside and do what needs to be done.  “I’ll make it up to him later,” I told myself.  That was a decision.

Now I can take action on that decision—no procrastination this time:  I’m done with the post, it’s still sunny and warm, and there’s still plenty of time to take Tav to the park. 

I hope your Christmas was a great one… Happy New Year.

-jef

Even a guy like me tends to believe people initially… yep, I subscribe to The Truth Bias just like you do. 

But there’s believing, and then there’s trusting. 

We tend to believe everyone (it’s shallow enough, though, we can toss it aside immediately when there’s cause for doubt).

And we tend to trust the people closest to us (and it’s deep enough with family and friends that we can maintain it to our detriment).

With trust comes risk, right?  Put your trust, your faith, in another person and you’re vulnerable.  Don’t infer that I’m suggesting trust is a bad idea.  It’s not.  It’s necessary.  But it does leave you vulnerable.  And so herein lies the trick to it all, the safety valve:  Knowing when to stop believing, stop trusting.  That’s a hard thing to recognize when the person who’s deceiving you is a spouse, parent, sibling, child, or close friend. 

In the months since my April post on Implication, Inference, and Deduction I’ve gotten a number of emails from readers who keyed in on something in that post that could have seemed inconsequential, but wasn’t.  I realized the moment I typed it that it was significant, but didn’t know whether anyone else would catch the importance of this simple line:

“…lying and deception can’t be accomplished by the perpetrator alone; they need our help.”

Fishing really isn’t fishing unless you catch something, and deception doesn’t really matter unless it’s believed.  A tree falling in a forest doesn’t make a sound; it needs an ear to hear it. 

We blame others for deceiving us, but the deed is never complete until we believe them.  And believing a lie really is  a choice, even if we make it by default.  The real value of knowing how to spot a lie is so that you’ll have a reliable method for knowing when it’s wise to stop believing another person.

Catching someone at deception can be:  Frustrating?  Disappointing?  Exciting?  Bewildering?  Amusing?  Maddening?  Empowering? Confusing? 

But for some, the first reaction is a sense of guilt.  Guilt?  How could we feel guilty, when it was the other person who deceived us?

It’s the stakes that matter:  Sometimes deception covers for dangerous stuff.  We can miss signs of addiction.  Reckless behavior.  Suicidal tendencies.  Even murder. 

Wichita’s BTK Killer, Dennis Rader, may be the most extreme example of how belief, trust, and absense of doubt can pervade personal relationships.  Rader, who murdered 10 people in their respective homes from 1974 to 1991, was a former Cub Scout leader, president of his church’s Congregation Council, married 34 years with children, and at the time of his arrest, a supervisor in the Park City, Kansas Compliance Department.  For a while he even worked for ADT security, installing home alarms.

Could his wife have ever suspected her husband was the BTK Killer?  Were there signs?  Or did her trust override them?  We know he stalked three women in the ’80s and ’90s, and had restraining orders placed against him.  Is it possible to live with a serial killer for 17 years and recognize no symptoms at all?  This isn’t a rhetorical question—it appears Mrs. Rader did. 

So how was he caught?  Trust.  It can work in every direction, you know. 

Rader enjoyed taunting the cops, and in one of his 2005 correspondences he asked them if information on computer floppy disks could be traced to their source.  He trusted the police—and they lied:  They told him there was no way to determine what computer a floppy disk had originated from.  He confidently sent his next communication to police on a floppy, which was immediately traced to a computer he’d used at the Lutheran Church he attended. 

When it comes to deception, oftentimes we don’t “catch” anyone.  We just find out…  like Mrs. Rader did.  And for those who believed, trusted, and then missed the signs that warned of something bad, there can be the overwhelming sense that they should have recognized the deception, seen the truth, and been able to avert the consequences.

Some of those readers who emailed me were conflicted because they picked up on the significance of that little line in my April post… realizing that deception is accomplished in the mind of the listener, they regretted believing, trusting, and they blamed themselves for bad outcomes. 

The person who uses deception always has the advantage over us.  Action is always more effective than reaction.  And the perpetrator is always responsible.

There’s no shame in believing another person. 

There should be no guilt in trusting family and friends. 

Yes, it’s risky.

And it’s necessary.

-jef

For virtually everyone, this “decision” is made passively, by default:  They believe.

This automatic tendency toward belief isn’t due to naivet’e, ignorance, or having not read my book, but just a phenomenon called ”The Truth Bias“, which simply means that we all naturally tend to believe what others tell us. 

This default faith in what others say remains perfectly intact until we have reason for doubt.  Sometimes that doubt comes almost instantly… sometimes never.  People do tell the truth sometimes, you know.  

When I read this week about the 18 year old Texas girl who lied about having cancer, raised $17,000 from the community, and even spoke at schools about her bout with the disease, it reminded me of The Truth Bias, and then something even more relevant to the case:  The power of “The Big Lie“.

So how could a high school senior pull off such an enormous lie for months on end?  Two forces of human nature helped her along:

1-She of course had The Truth Bias working in her favor—people tend to believe until there’s reason to doubt,

and… 

2-There was the enormity of the lie—it leaves us awestruck, but the enormity of the lie was precisely what made it work.

Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Dr. Joseph Goebbel’s once declared that, ”If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”  The brazenness of this is profound on a couple levels.  Not only did he believe in big lies, he openly professed his belief, apparently unworried that it would undermine his technique.  And it didn’t!

But it was Hitler himself who coined the term, The Big Lie, in his 1925 Mein Kampf:  “A lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence” to distort the truth so infamously.”

Where truth, deception, and lies are concerned, instinct always betrays us, and here it is again—what would the average person answer if you asked them which has the greatest chance of success:  A small lie… or a big one?

Correct answer:  Always the big one.  

Of course, few people have the impudence to try The Big Lie. 

But if they do… you may just believe it.

-jef

Since I watch VERY little TV, it’s sort of fortuitous that I happened to land on a channel that was carrying what would be a very unusual live speech by our president.

I saw Barak Obama step up to the podium.

The crowd seated itself and went silent… 

and then…

NOTHING.

See for yourself what I saw that morning, maybe you’ll understand why I forgot all about my chicken:

While President Obama has been criticized for his dependence on teleprompters, that isn’t my point here. 

Rather, I’m submitting to you that this incident serves as blatant and undeniable evidence of… THE POWER OF SILENCE.

In Conquering Deception© I told you how to use silence as a weapon, because it’s the least known, most overlooked, and easiest tool you can use in any conversation. 

Silence is awkward. 

People dislike it.

And if you understand the psychological effect of silence on us all, and learn to master it, you can intentionally use it to guide conversation, even gain information from the person you’re conversing with. 

Rule #1:  The person who is most uncomfortable with silence will always break it.  And they’ll usually say something:  1-Stupid,  or 2-Revealing.  People often stop themselves just before speaking the thoughts they want to protect most.  And we often help them by interjecting our own comments, ideas, or experiences.  When you sense there’s more they could say, don’t speak; allow the discomfort of silence to draw more out of them.  

While it might seem logical that the person who speaks most in a conversation is the one who controls it, first logic is often wrong.  When we speak, we reveal ourselves.  So instead of filling silence with words, allow it to hang.  The other person will speak if you don’t, and they’ll likely say something of interest to you.

Rule #2:  He who is most comfortable with silence always commands the conversation.  Now, Obama didn’t intentionally use silence here, and it’s obvious he wasn’t comfortable with it; but it was extraordinarily powerful nonetheless, wasn’t it?  

Like any other weapon, the impact of silence is dependent upon which side of it you happen to be.  A gun can be in your hand, or pointed at you.  It’s powerful either way—an asset to one person, a detriment to the other. 

Consider this:  Could Barak Obama have said anything in that minute and 15 seconds that would have been more spellbinding than his silence? 

-jef

But we confuse the two all the time. 

Cops may be the worst on this one.

Believe it or not, when I was ”on the job” I personally saw other detectives do TV-style interrogations on actual suspects. 

They yelled.  They intimidated.  On more than one occasion I heard a fellow officer say, ”Do you know what they do to punks like you in the joint?”  And they expected a guy to confess after hearing this? 

The last homicide case I worked as a detective was the double murder of an elderly couple.  They’d been together constantly for 55 years—and were still together in death on side-by-side tables for their Saturday afternoon autopsies.  While we waited for the pathologist to arrive, I remember one of the guys jokingly called it a ”double matinee”.  Sick, huh?  A slight variation of the classic Gallows Humor—and very common among cops.        

Anyway, we had suspects in this case, and a fellow detective decided to take his turn at questioning one of them.  I watched through the two-way glass in disbelief as the detective walked into the interrogation room wearing mirrored sunglasses—and wore them through his entire questioning of the guy.

Do you think he got anything of value, much less a confession from this suspected murderer?  Hey, you don’t have to be Columbo to know the answer to that.

So I guess the point is this, that  I saw a lot of cops over the years question suspects in ways that were so stereotypical, so inept, so faulty… that I was left with only one conclusion:  Rather than using sound and proven interrogation techniques, they were simply emulating what they’d seen on TV cop shows.

But the one show I knew they were NOT mimicking was Columbo.  He was never aggressive with suspects, he didn’t threaten them with the unseemly consequences that awaited them, he rarely outright accused them of committing the crime, in fact he didn’t even conduct formal, private interrogations of his suspects.

Instead, Columbo walked all of his suspects through a process of deduction.  In the video I have here for you, he does this in his classic fashion, blatantly exposing his theories as to how the crime happened and along the way subtly revealing to the suspect all the inescapable facts that point to him as being the killer.

Another interesting feature of Columbo-style Questioning:  The natural instinct among cops, and the rest of us when we want to get the truth from another person, is to show how much we know.  Which isn’t a bad idea at all.  I teach methods for doing this, and they work like no other. 

What Columbo did, though, is show the suspect his certainty of their actions in a very circuitous way.  He never came right out and said, “I know you did it,” and the suspects never gave confessions, either.  By the end of any given episode, though, Columbo had them defeated, on the ropes, and convinced that their guilt was not only known, but could be proven.  They were bested by a potent combination of fact, deduction, and inescapable conclusion.

But still it was TV, right?  Does Columbo-style Questioning work in real life?  I’ll leave that for you to consider.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a funny (weird) story about Peter Falk:  Two and a half years ago I spoke to an audience in San Francisco.  During my talk I used the line you read earlier, “You don’t have to be Colombo to know…”.

After this speech I didn’t have anything else scheduled until week’s end, so I decided to drive down to Los Angeles and relax a couple nights.

In the six months since my last trip to LA, I’d picked up a new GPS.  Since I didn’t have a reference point in the thing for my destination, I plugged in Lucille Ball’s address:  1000 Roxbury, Beverly Hills (I know that’s weird in itself, but a story for another time).  I knew this would take me right past my hotel just off the 405, so close enough.

Instead of going straight to the hotel, I ended up driving on into Beverly Hills, and right in front of Lucy’s house.  I remembered that the wife of a close friend of mine is a big fan, so I snapped a picture of the house.  As I drove slowly up Roxbury, I snapped pictures of 3 more homes randomly, then drove around a bit and ended up at at the Sunset Trocadero Lounge for a late dinner.

The next night I was on the computer plinking around, and decided to Google ’Lucille Ball home’ just to see what would come up.   Sure enough, there was the house.  And I found some interesting trivia, ie, the I Love Lucy eposide where she and Ethel climbed a wall into Richard Widmark’s backyard?  That was filmed in Lucy’s backyard.

So then I saw a link:  “Roxbury Drive - Street of the Stars”.  I wondered what other celebrities have called it home, so I clicked.  Jimmy Stewart.  Agnes Moorehead.  Jack Benny.  Ricky Schroeder.  And… Peter Falk?  His current residence was at 1004 Roxbury, just two doors north of Lucy.  You can see that page here.

How crazy was this?  I mentioned Columbo in a speech that morning, then just happened that afternoon to drive by the home of the actor who played him?  Then I looked at the picture of Falk’s home…

It couldn’t be.  

I grabbed my camera and looked  at the shots I’d randomly snapped driving up Roxbury, and there was Peter Falk’s house.  You see the photo I took, up top.  Compare it to the photo of his home on the website (taken in Summer) and you’ll see the angle is exactly the same.  ”Weird, wild stuff,” Johnny Carson would say.

Don Knotts was the only guy on earth that could’ve done Barney Fife, Art Carney was the only guy who could’ve played Norton, and no other actor could have played the disheveled Columbo.

So the recent death of Peter Falk left me thinking about a few things.  First, the unique questioning style of Columbo, and how we all might learn from it.  Could it work in real life? 

Then my strange experience on Roxbury Drive that day in 2009 came to mind. 

Why did that happen?

Did it have any meaning?

Was it just coincidence?   

Or is there even such a thing?

-jef

I never had any faith in the thing working, but still I’d dust it off occasionally over the years and crank it up for guests, or when things were slow around the house.  You know, just for fun. 

So you can credit coincidence, intuition, or a crystal ball that’s right once in a blue moon, but 2 of my recent posts contained a couple of foreshadowings that were manifested through the Casey Anthony verdict yesterday:

Foreshadowing Number 1# - In the Oprah/OJ post I mentioned that “we often consider the lie more egregious than the act they lied about”. 

Is it interesting to you that the jury found her Not Guilty of murder… but convicted her of lying about it?  In other words, she’s guilty of something that she did because they were investigating her for something she didn’t do.

Tangled?  Not really.  In fact, it makes perfect sense:  The average person’s belief that Anthony murdered her daughter was largely based on her behavior AFTER the disappearance of the girl: 

-She waited a month to report her daughter missing. 

-She was photographed carousing and dancing, living it up while her daughter’s condition and whereabouts were purportedly unknown.  (Keeping with tradition, in the photo up top Casey sports a Kleenex and a smile in the courtroom after the verdict).

-And most of all, she lied to the people who were trying to find out what happened to infant Caylee.     

What’s the number one reason people lie?  Self-preservation.  It could be to save ourselves embarrassment, or the electric chair, but regardless of scale the fundamentals are always the same:  Lies are an escape hatch out of a threatening situation.

Our rational minds tell us none of her behavior fits with an innocent mother who’s lost her child…  Why would Casey Anthony lie if she had nothing to do with  her daughter’s death?  She must have been her daughter’s killer. 

The pitfall to this conclusion is that it’s based on inference, that dangerous little temptation I warned you about in my April 13 post.  

Foreshadowing Number 2 - In my reply to Calvin’s comment in the 2nd Weiner post I said that “Juries are TOTALLY unpredictable.” 

I learned this more than 20 years ago when I was a street cop:  I was dispatched to a burglary alarm at 1am… another officer arrived just ahead of me, in time to see the burglar running through the showroom of the furniture store with a chair over his head…  the burglar threw the chair through the front window of the store to escape, and the officer was there to intercept him with a .357 as the burglar jumped out onto the sidewalk.  

That’s when I arrived to find the officer, gun drawn, standing over a man dressed in all black, right down to his gloves; this was the one and only time I saw a sterotypically dressed cat burglar.  I handcuffed the guy and we took him to jail.

And you know what?  The burglar (a high school dropout who already had multiple convictions for burglary) represented himself in his own trial… and was ACQUITTED.  I’ve never predicted the outcome of a jury trial since.  Why do you think prosecutors and defense attorneys agree to plea deals?  Because no matter how good either thinks his case is, they don’t trust juries any more than I do.

So the Anthony case mirrors the Simpson trial on a couple levels: 

1-In both instances common logic held that they’d be convicted… and they were found Not Guilty.  Keep in mind, being found ‘Not Guilty’ is not the same as being found ‘Innocent’.   

2-The Not Guilty verdicts have changed no one’s opinion on the guilt of either Anthony or Simpson.  If you think either or both are guilty, you still think that, don’t you?

Tomorrow Casey Anthony will be sentenced for the 4 counts of lying to the police.  They’re just misdemeanors, each carrying a maximum one year sentence.  Given the seriousness of all the other charges she faced, it’s both surprising and fortuitous that the prosecution even charged her with lying.  If they hadn’t, she have been convicted of nothing at all. 

As I’ve said all along, it’s often the lie that lingers longest.

-jef

Would you be surprised if he submitted to her demand?

I guess my surprise was that Oprah thinks he’s guilty.

You can see a clip of Oprah talking about her idea here.  In it she says, “I wanted to talk to him, not because, you know, not to be a voyeur for that evening, but just because that’s another, that trial sort of  changed the consciousness, ah, in the country.”

It’s always interesting when a person denies something that hasn’t been charged.  What does it mean when Oprah says that voyeurism isn’t her motivation?  Let’s take Oprah at her word, maybe that wouldn’t be her purpose for getting OJ’s confession… but she knows that voyeurism would be THE motivation of everyone watching the interview.   

But the real question is this:  Why do we need OJ to confess?

The answer to this lies in human nature, and it’s at work within all of us when we perceive that someone has told us a  lie.  

So here are The Two Deadliest Sins people commit regarding deception, especially in personal relationships:

1-Their pursuit of a lie, and

2-Their pursuit of a confession.

When I say “pursuit of a lie” I’m not just referring to finding a past lie, but soliciting a new one.  Suppose a parent has forbidden her son to hang out with ‘Jimmy’.  Today she learns that her son spent all of yesterday at Jimmy’s house.  What will the average parent do in this situation?  Many of us would unwittingly find the temptation to solicit a lie overwhelming and ask this question of the son:  “So where did you go yesterday?”      

Can you think of a time when you knew the truth, yet asked the other person questions to see if they would lie to you?

When we know the truth and then ask the other person questions about it with feigned naivete, we’re actually soliciting a lie… and complicating the situation.  In fact, lies grate the ego so badly that we often consider the lie more egregious than the act they lied about! 

The solution to Deadliest Sin #1:  Quash instinct here—move past lies as if they didn’t happen and pursue remedies instead.

Now on to Deadliest Sin #2—Pursuit of a Confession—and how it relates to Oprah and OJ.  Whether you’re a cop with a criminal suspect, or just trying to get at the truth in a personal relationship, the dynamics—and the temptations—are the same; they’re concealing the truth, and you want them to admit what they’ve done.

Here’s the little-known secret:  Their overt confession isn’t necessary, and you undermine your goals in seeking it directly. 

In my public speaking appearances I often share techniques for getting the truth through Minimization and something I call, Coming from a Position of Knowledge.

You can get what amounts to the equivalent of a confession, without demanding it specifically.  Back again to human nature:  People will resist giving you what you appear to badly want, particularly when it requires they give up something. 

You’ve probably seen two children playing nicely in the living room floor, neither paying any attention to some toy that’s been in plain sight for hours.  But when one picks it up, suddenly the other wants it.  And the kid with the toy will fight like a drunk monkey to keep it.

Adults still have this infantile trait buried deeply within; when you ask a person to confess to a ‘wrong’, they will fight giving you what you want.  What’s more, as you continue to demand the truth, the weaker you will appear, and the more it will seem you have no proof of their misdeeds.  This is where the combined techniques of Minimization and Coming from a Position of Knowledge can yield results that would otherwise be unattainable.

So maybe I’ve been rambling, let’s get back to Oprah and OJ…  

Do we already know the truth? 

Do you want to hear him confess? 

Does anybody really wonder if he’s guilty? 

Or is that we’d just love hearing him say he murdered two people with a knife, while we sit transfixed with a bowl of popcorn in our lap? 

Sounds kinda like voyeurism.

So again I ask you:  Do you think OJ would actually confess to two murders on television? 

Keep in mind, he can’t be tried for the crimes—he was acquitted. 

In fact, that means OJ Simpson is the one person on the planet who’s been cleared of these murders. 

-jef

“Confessing to the lie”:  This NEVER happens, especially with public figures, so the fact that Anthony Weiner (D-NY) did it makes this a very interesting case study. 

And while the rest of country talks about the obvious points of this scandal, I’d like you to consider a question that’s escaping everyone:  Why did Anthony Weiner (D-NY) turn on his words and come clean?

If you’ve read Conquering Deception you already know that once a person takes a ‘public’ position on a subject (even if just before one person) they’ll fight to maintain it.  In other words, once a person has spoken a lie, they tend to stick with it, defend it, and even add to it—even in the face of evidence that clearly controverts the lie.

(This is why it’s vitally important not to invite a lie, or even allow a person to lie if you can keep them from it—yes, I have techniques for both.)

Anyway, Anthony Weiner came clean for a couple reasons:

1-Additional similar acts came to light:  A public figure who fights a scandal with lies runs great risk of drawing more accusers/victims out of the shadows. 

Some may be infuriated at the deception.  Even more will want to take some of the limelight for themselves, get their 15 minutes out of the occasion.  So more photos came out, and more Tweet pic recipients emerged… one of them a 17 year old girl.  The evidence was mounting that he’d engaged in this kind of behavior on other occasions; sure, the claim of his Twitter account being hijacked was doubted by all, but now it could be proven totally implausible.  

2-No one wants to be proven a liar:  When irrefutable evidence of his similar deeds surfaced, Weiner was a proven liar.  His only way out?  Admit it, and take credit for being truthful.   

When I interrogated suspects as a police detective we often got confessions simply by presenting the person with evidence of their guilt.  A fingerprint.  Surveillance video.  Even by telling them that their accomplice had already come clean (and sometimes this was a lie). 

Hey, if we could prove he did it, why would a suspect feel the need to confess and absolutely condemn himself?  Because no one wants be proven a liar.   And I’ve seen people admit to crimes they knew would put them in prison for decades… because they didn’t want to be on record lying about it.  Now, they didn’t consciously think of it in this way, of course, and later they regretted speaking telling the truth, but subconsciously this phenomenon was at work in them.

Consider this:  Bill Clinton denied the Monica Lewinsky thing because there was no evidence.  It was her word against his.  Until the blue dress.  Faced with this incontrovertible proof that demonstrated he was lying, he quickly addressed the nation and fessed up… well, sort of.  You remember the twisting of language and the minimization; but that’s a lesson for another day.

So a couple of lessons for you out of all this: 

1-If you want the truth from someone, know that it’s much harder to get—often impossible—if they’ve already told you a lie about it.  In a ‘private scandal’ you won’t have the media working to alert others who have damning information that will help you drive out a confession. 

2-Even as a person comes clean on a ‘wrong-doing’, know that they’ll still minimize, or rationalize what they’ve done.  In Weiner’s case, he claims to be going to rehab; this is a way to both shirk responsibility, and then segue into a resurrection, become a person different from the one who Tweeted recklessly.

So even when a person does the exceedingly rare thing of admitting they lied, the next chapter itself is often laced with deception.  

More refined.

Much less obvious.

And much more convincing.

It’s  a twisted sport, and the best players never retire.

-jef