DIY Life

The site Mind Control Techniques, Covert Hypnosis, and Persuasion has an interesting article: Your Eyes Don't Lie -- Reading Thoughts By Eye Movements.

The article is based on the concept of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), and states that people's eyes will go in certain directions if their thoughts are in specific categories associated with those eye movements. To wit:

• Eye contact denotes interest. Brief eye contact denotes nervousness or some disinterest. Prolonged eye contact may denote an attempt at intimidation.
• Eyes looking straight up may denote contempt or annoyance, unless the conversation is religious in nature.
• Eyes looking to the left suggest that someone is imagining what something sounds like.
• Eyes looking to the right suggest that someone is recalling what something sounds like.
• Eyes looking up and to the left mean that someone is imagining a picture.
• Eyes looking up and to the right mean that someone is trying to recall an image.
• Eyes looking down and to the left mean someone is thinking about their emotions.
• Eyes looking down and to the right denote an "internal dialogue" of some kind, whether it's the recollection of a past conversation or an internal debate about what to say next.
• The directions may be the opposite for some people, but they should be consistently so for the person concerned.
• To see if someone is lying, establish a "baseline" for them by asking questions you know they won't respond to with a lie; observe what they do when you know they're telling the truth.

I'm not going to lie to you: I think there are problems with this information. If you're curious, please join me after the break.

As I said a while back, the problem with these "liar cues" is that sometimes they're indicating something other than falseness. The comments to the article may be helpful, in that several readers suggest that it has no scientific basis and that internal consistency is the real key to spotting lies. There is disagreement about the effectiveness of many aspects of Neuro-linguistic Programming, even within the NLP community, though some elements have been shown to be effective.

Because so many people believe many common myths about lie-spotting, articles like this often make it possible for liars to become better at what they do: no, the person making eye contact with you and nodding is not necessarily listening as intently as you might believe (the author of the article admits that eye contact can be meaningless and never states that it indicates truthfulness, only interest).

On the other hand, I could see this information being useful to parents who have a kid who's a habitual, not-very-accomplished fibber; the article's author positions it as something relevant to poker players. (Although the photo may suggest otherwise, it is not useful with regard to your cat. If he or she is making eye contact, it is probably because you have tuna on the bridge of your nose.)

Ultimately, it's probably not a good idea to make any major life decisions based on something you read on a hypnosis site on the Internet. Or a do-it-yourself blog, for that matter.