With Christmas almost here Carol Kinsey Goman* has a warning – Santa is watching and will find you out.
Have you ever wondered how Santa Claus determined whether to leave you a present or a lump of coal on Christmas Eve?
How he knew if you’ve been naughty or nice?
I don’t have any hard evidence to back me up, but I’m pretty sure that he must be a first-class lie detector.
If so, here is how Santa did it.
He began with a baseline.
The first and most important step in Santa’s deception detection was learning your baseline behaviour under relaxed or generally stress-free conditions.
This is so he could compare it with the expressions, gestures and other signals that are only apparent when you are under stress.
He watched you while you were chatting informally and he noticed how your body looked when you were relaxed.
He saw your normal amount of eye contact and blink rate, the gestures you used most frequently, the posture you assumed when you were comfortable.
The normal pace of your speech and tone of voice.
Then, after he knew your behavioural baseline, he stayed alert for meaningful deviations that signalled a stress reaction (and possible deception).
He saw you when you’re faking.
There are seven basic emotions that are shared, recognised, and expressed the same way around the world.
Discovered and categorised by Paul Ekman and his colleagues at the University of California in San Francisco, the universal emotional expressions are joy, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and contempt.
When you didn’t genuinely feel the emotion that you were trying to display, it showed in expressions that didn’t use all the muscles that are typically part of that emotion.
For example, if your smile didn’t include the eye muscles, it was not a felt smile.
Real smiles crinkle the corners of your eyes and change your entire face.
‘Polite’ smiles involve the mouth only and are often asymmetrical.
In monitoring your emotional reactions, Santa also looked for simulated emotions.
These are where you tried to convince others that you felt a certain way by simulating the facial expression associated with that feeling.
He noticed your ‘terribly sincere furrowed-brow’ or your exaggerated display of anger that felt excessive.
He knew, too, that any expression you displayed for more than five to 10 seconds was almost certainly being faked.
He took note when your verbal and nonverbal messages were – or were not – aligned.
When your thoughts and words were in sync (when you believed what you were saying) Santa saw it in your body language.
This was because your gestures, expressions and postures fell into natural alignment with your verbal message.
However, he was also on the lookout for incongruence, where your nonverbal behaviour contradicted your words.
This could be with a side-to-side head shake while saying “yes” or a slight shoulder shrug (which is a sign of uncertainty) as you stated you were “absolutely positive”.
Santa knew that often verbal-nonverbal incongruence is a sign of intentional deceit.
At the very least, it showed an inner conflict of some sort between what you were thinking and what you were saying.
He looked for clusters.
Clusters played a key role in Santa’s ability to spot lies.
Your nonverbal cues occurred in what is called a ‘gesture cluster’ — a group of movements, postures and actions that reinforce a common point.
A single gesture could mean nothing at all, but when he saw that gesture coupled with at least two other reinforcing nonverbal signals, the meaning became clearer.
According to research by David DeSterno, of Northeastern University, there is one specific cluster of nonverbal cues that proved statistically to be a highly accurate indicator of deception.
The ‘tell-tale four’ body language signals that are associated with lying are hand touching, face touching, crossing arms, and leaning away.
He judged you as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ only after considering the following:
For the vast majority of us, the act of lying triggers a heightened (and observable) stress response, but here’s what complicates matters.
Not all people demonstrate the same degree of emotion.
Not all liars (especially if polished or pathological) display readily detectable signs of stress or guilt.
Not all lies trigger a stress reaction.
Social lies, for example, are so much a part of daily life that they hardly ever distress the sender.
Santa Claus also knows that truthful (“nice”) people like you can exhibit anxiety for a variety of perfectly innocent reasons.
These can include the fear of not being believed or discomfort speaking about embarrassing or emotionally arousing topics.
Santa Claus takes all this into consideration, before visiting your house — and that’s why on Christmas morning you will receive all those wonderful presents.
*Carol Kinsey Goman is an international keynote speaker for the Institute for Management Studies. She can be reached at [email protected]
This article first appeared on Carol’s webpage.
