Editor's Choice Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry Article Date: 12 Jul 2012 - 14:00 PDT

Current ratings for: NLP - Eye Movements Don't Indicate Lying

5 (1 votes)

A lot of research has been done to establish whether there is a link between behavior and lying, but no one has looked into the popular notion that eye movement relates to whether a person is being truthful or not.

NLP advocates maintain that a person who is lying often looks up and to the left as you look at them, while a person telling the truth tends to look to the right. The relationship between eye movement and thought is an important part of the NLP framework, which is not only about reading other people but also learning to relate better to people, by having better communication skills.

Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) investigated the idea by filming volunteer test subjects, as they either lied or told the truth. Their eye movements were then assessed in detail following a predefined method of describing their movement.

In their second study, a different group of people were asked to watch the video recordings and see if they could detect the lies based on the volunteers' eye movements.

Wiseman described the findings as conclusive:

The researchers conducted another trial to cross-check their findings in the real world. They examined press conferences where people were claiming to be victims of crimes or appealing for missing people, where the outcomes were already known.

Dr Leanne ten Brinke noted that:

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NLP - Eye Movements Don't Indicate Lying