Liar, Liars, steroids are fire

According to Noah Zandan, clarity of language and in your writing indicate truthiness. When you tell the truth, you use simpler sentences. What does this say about smart people? Do complicated sentences hide the lies?

Lance Armstrong said many words, very rapidly, and ultimately he was found to have taken many, many steroids. All of his inspiration words plastered on the 24/7 gyms were removed and the walls are much more relaxing for those on the treadmills or lifting weights. We no longer have to gaze at Armstong’s rippling calves poised on bike pedals and read his annoying quotes:

• Pain is temporary.
• Pain is temporary.
• If you worried about falling off the bike, you’d never get on.
• There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say: ‘Enough is enough.
• Extraordinary allegations require extraordinary evidence. (liar)
• The riskiest thing you can do is get greedy. (The last one is a confession).

In 2007 when Senator John Edwards was seen as a frontrunner for VP and then possibly for the U.S. Presidency, reporters asked if he was having an affair. Edwards put out a press release that read like it was written by a team of lawyers. When he finally told the truth in 2010, Edwards said, simply, “I am the father of Rielle Hunter’s child.”

We will have technology that you will be able to use to detect if someone is lying to you when they say, “I love you.”

Zandan did a Ted-Ed Talk on the science of lying in 2014 and it currently has racked up 2.4 million views. If you need to up your liar’s game, study this Ted-EdTalk.

From YouTube: We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day. And although we’ve spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect these lies by tracking physiological changes in their tellers, these methods have proved unreliable. Is there a more direct approach? Noah Zandan uses some famous examples of lying to illustrate how we might use communications science to analyze the lies themselves.

Bio (from South by Southwest 2013)

Noah Zandan

CEO

Quantified Impressions

Noah Zandan (@nzandan) is the CEO and co-founder of Quantified Impressions, a leading enterprise language management firm. Quantified Impressions works with Fortune 500 companies, global law firms, TED, and academic institutions to transform communications effectiveness through data, technology, and science.

Noah has pioneered the use of data and technology to quantitatively assess organizational and professional communication effectiveness. He is recognized as one of the most innovative domain experts in the rapidly growing field of language and people analytics. Noah was nationally broadcast in 2013 discussing the future of personal analytics on NPR All Tech Considered and is a Wall Street Journal expert on work communications. He has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and Fortune and featured for his analytics on the 2012 presidential debates on ABC, the Daily Beast, and the London Telegraph.

Noah formerly specialized in quantitative analysis for Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers in New York City and the private equity firm Brentwood Associations in Los Angeles. He has a MBA in marketing and finance from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and an Economics degree from Dartmouth College.

Noah is also the founder and executive director of the Rockway Foundation, a non-profit supporting innovative educational infrastructure projects in Nicaragua.