There have been studies which have shown that people who have been trained to detect deception faired only slightly better at spotting a liar than those individuals who received no lie detecting training. This is not surprising since the method usually used in these studies to detect deception was observing someone's body language. The weakness in this form of lie detection is that a nonverbal gesture does not always equate to deception. My experience told me that someone trained in the Statement Analysis techniques stood a much greater chance at identifying a lie. To see if this was true, I put the Statement Analysis techniques to the test.

The Study

In the fall of 2013, I asked 100 people to read ten statements and tell me if the statements were true or false. Each statement consisted of 300 - 400 words. All of the statements described an incident such as being robbed, being carjacked or having their home or car broken into. The participants were not placed on any time restriction and were given as much time as needed to read the statements. The participants were not asked to explain why they felt a statement was true or false. Five of the statements were true and five of the statements were false. The participants were not aware of the true/false breakdown.

The Participants

All of the participants were over the age of 18. The majority of the participants were from the United States. Some of the participants were from other English speaking countries such as Canada, England and Australia. Fifty of the participants had completed my Statement Analysis On-Demand Training course. The other fifty participants stated they had no training in analyzing statements for deception.

The Results

The study showed that those people who received training in the Statement Analysis techniques could detect deception with 84% accuracy. Those individuals who had no training could only spot a liar 53% of the time. Here is the breakdown of how the participants scored.

The study shows that people who took my Statement Analysis On-Demand Training course are far more likely to determine if a person is lying or telling the truth than those individuals who rely on their gut instinct. Six of the trained participants scored 100% and eighteen other trained participants scored 90%. The reason the Statement Analysis techniques are accurate is because people's words will betray them. If you know what to look for in a verbal or written statement, you can determine if the statement is true or false.

It should be noted that some of the trained participants in this survey may have had other training in linguistic analysis. This still verifies the theory if you know what to look for in a statement you stand a greater chance of detecting deception.