Why does the body lie so badly?

Have you already noticed? The higher someone is on the scale of power, the more discreet his gestures are. And the lower you are on that scale, the richer your body language is. And something else: the older we get, the more we stop our body language. Power and age reduce gestures. An example: when a child lies, he covers his mouth with his hand. This unconscious gesture is not lost; instead, it changes over the years. When an adult lies, his subconscious also gives him the order to retain the words. Only adults no longer blindly follow the unconscious: they stop the gesture. While the hand moves towards the face, at the last moment a kind of emergency braking occurs. The gesture is diverted to the nose, as if it stung.

With other gestures, the same thing happens. Therefore, the older a person is, the more difficult it is to read their body language. However, the body does not lie. Metaphorically, he bites his lips enough times, but that is also significant.

The most difficult thing is to lie when we have a close relationship with someone. There you can see all the tiny signs that suddenly do not match anymore. Microseñales that we do not control very well: raising an eyebrow, a tic at the corner of the lips, shuddering pupils. All of them are signs that can disprove the superior sign of honesty, open hands. In most cases, we instinctively notice the deception. But we do not always want to believe our "sixth sense", we do not want to recognize it when the words and gestures are no longer synchronized.

In women, this instinct for gestures that no longer correspond to words, is especially pronounced. This "sixth sense" is stronger in women who have children. Scientists explain it especially with training, because in the first years of their children's lives, mothers can only communicate with them through body language.

Even those who train constantly for this, such as politicians, are only able to falsify their bodily signals for a short time and have to control themselves very well so that the body does not constantly re-emit arbitrary signals that disprove the words.

The actors, professional "liars" for reasons of their trade, also have to make this experience. That is why they attach such great importance to the fact that there is always a certain distance between them and the public. It is the distance that creates illusions. The new media have not exactly facilitated their task to the mimes. On the stage, the movements, the gestures, have to be stylized, exaggerated and full of emotion until they explode: the anguish in a single gesture of the hand, thrilling even those in the last row. The television and film screens have brought us closer to the fiction interpreters until they almost seem like they can be played. But on the small screen, great gestures are implausible, bombastic and ridiculous. Therefore, the actors have to be multi-faceted and make more nuanced gestures in front of the camera.

Can you manipulate body language?

Maybe it is possible to some extent. The difficulty of an expression contrary to the truth lies in the fact that subconscious psychological processes are not easy to determine or automatically dominate.

Therefore, those who only allow an informal lie from time to time, are the most frequently caught. While lying your subconscious emits a lot of nervous energy. This becomes a restless gesture that again denies everything that has just been painstakingly constructed with words. To put it cynically: the one who, for professional reasons, from time to time departs from the straight path of pure truth, as may be the case of a politician, an actor, a representative or a salesman, usually has cultivated his body language until such a point that it is no longer easy to discover the lie.

Whoever wants to be truthful and, at the same time, seem credible, will have to suppress practically all gestures. In fact, this only succeeds with very large gestures. The little ones, the micro-movements, do not let themselves be dominated so easily: that aforementioned tic of various facial muscles, the pupils, the drops of sweat on the eyebrows, the blush on the cheeks, the flickers and a thousand other gestures that inspire the interlocutors the feeling that the thing is not so easy. But only professionals in the discovery of lies, psychologists and criminologists, are able to perceive these micro-gestures, since they only appear during fractions of seconds.

If a lie has to work, the safest tactic is to avoid direct presence. It is also easier to lie when sitting behind a desk or looking, for example, over a fence. But the surest way to a lie is still the telephone conversation; therefore, it is always used for farewells and for all kinds of excuses.

If you want to learn to understand body language, you have to take a little time and study the gestures of others, where body language is true and original: for example, in a train station or an airport, because it is from places where we are under the pressure of time and where elementary feelings are at stake: happiness and joy, irritation and worry or impatience. But it should not be observed only when the barriers of control of others give way, when our fellow men gesticulate, walk, stand or sit. Let us become aware of our own body language! The knowledge of ourselves will allow, in the future, a better understanding.