Tips to unlocking what lies behind certain eye movements
Tiny eye movements can give away a person's intentions. A local undercover SAPS officer shares with Review tips on how to identify these movements.
POLOKWANE – Review spoke to a local undercover police officer, to find out more about his interrogation methods. He says there are a number of ways to figure out if someone is lying, but for him, the most effective method is reading their eyes.
“The eyes will always give a person away no matter who they are because there is a saying that goes ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’ and this is the truest thing that I have ever encountered,” the police officer told Review. He asked to remain anonymous due to the nature of his work.
Lying eyes or visual accessing cues:
A right-handed person will look up and to the left if they are telling a lie.
Auditory Remembering (AR):
When a person is asked to remember something like someone’s voice, that person will look straight to the left. This reveals they are being truthful in trying to recall a detail.
Feeling/Kinesthetic (F):
When a person is asked to remember a smell, they will look down and to the left to try and recall the smell.
Internal Dialog (AI):
When a person is asked a question and they look down and to the right, it indicates that the person could be talking to themselves and is a sign that they are hiding something or trying to convince themselves to lie (to protect their image).
Visual Constructed Images:
If a person is asked to visualise something, they will look up and to the right, indicating they are trying to form a picture in their minds.
Visual Remembrance (VR):
If a person is trying to recall something specific, such as a colour, their eyes will move to the right and upward, indicating that they are trying to remember it.
When a person is asked about a sound that they have never heard before they will look to the left.
If a child asks a parent a simple question, ‘May I have some more?’ or ‘Can I play at the park?’, you can quickly identify whether the child is being truthful when you ask them what their parent’s answer was. If the child looks to the left when answering, it is most likely a lie. Looking to the left indicates someone is constructing an image. If the child looks to the right, they are recalling something. “As with any other sciences, a person should understand the behaviour and person before concluding that they are lying or telling the truth. This is why it is something that can work perfectly when people know the person is lying or not,” the officer explained. He says the cues mentioned here are observed in right handed people and that it would be the other way around for people who are left handed.
