This piece is not about the mechanics of how Lie detectors work !.This piece is about human personality and criticality of your understanding the concept of authenticity and synchrony as you go around building your 'brand'.
When we react to any stimulation, our response is an outcome of a certain harmonious 'oneness' called you....the ultimate harmonious synchrony between your thoughts, your emotions, your physical movements, your facial expressions and your general behaviours.
Our perpetual search for the answer (whether true or false), only in the domain of verbal answers is absolutely futile. Words are relatively easy to control...they can be rehearsed to the point of manipulation and thus difficult to break through a clever effort. Ask any cross-examining lawyer and they will tell you that. Or ask the wife (see the doodle below) who doesn't believe but has no way to prove that her husband was not at work when she called !!!!
Carl Jung calls it 'individuation'....that integration of your conscious self with the unconscious, the dispositional with the experiential and the congruent with the incongruous.
So how do you make out if a person is lying ? Please do not succumb totally to the pop-psychology concepts like fidgeting, rambling, twitching, sweating of palms, stammering. Grandmother was wrong. There is no 'Pinocchio Effect' (says Amy 'Presence' Cuddy)...no single all time tell tale sign that gives up a liar !! These are stereotypical reveals.
When we begin to lie, we become non-authentic. We juggle with multiple narratives. Our verbal and non verbal responses lose their alignment. No longer is the person in a 'concordant' state. He goes into a discomboluted mental state.
This is the state of duplicity in which leaks happen for truth tends to reveal itself more clearly through actions than through speech.
This is the point where we move away from our curious interest in lie detecting and bring the theme back to Management, particularly -authenticity in Branding.
Brands are about authenticity. Your brand should represent you...and the harmonious individuation of the integration of your conscious self with the unconscious, the dispositional with the experiential and the congruous with the incongruous. That is when a real brand is built. Pretentious positioning that is not you, will falter.
Each one of us like the concordant state within, have also within us a natural mechanism to detect this disharmony when we experience it. We are unfortunately not be able to justify or explain our disbelief in that brand, logically or with evidence. We may call it a gut feel. But we certainly explain our reservations when we experience such a situation. This is what differentiates a brand from an advertisement of a brand feature.
Only authentic brands mark and sustain their presence. The others wither away and fall-off by the wayside.