Gender does not play a role in detection accuracy. Regardless of occupation males and females are equally poor at lie detection. Over 60 years of scientific investigation shows people in general are only about 56% accurate. Training does improve precision though.

When given the opportunity, liars usually choose to say less not more. This is a consistent scientific finding. The thinking is that this strategy minimizes the number of lies that have to be remembered. A successful lie catcher will allow and encourage people to talk as much as possible thus increasing the chances they will make a mistake that can be picked up on.

Research in the late 1990's showed Secret Service agents were best at spotting lies with some coming in at 90% accurate. Dr. Paul Ekman found the agents beat out lawyers, doctors, psychologists, judges, housewives and even police. Apparently they were very good at seeing microfacial expressions. Micro expressions are good indications of immediate emotional state and often show up when someone tells a lie.

Very solid research tells us that liars concentrate more on what they say and less on how they say it. It is impossible for a liar to memorize the gestures that should go along with what they are saying. Thus one productive way to catch them is to closely watch for gestures that are inconsistent with their words.

Researchers know that using any kind of motion when recalling an event helps recover old ideas and more "rich" information. A 2009 study even showed math scores were improved when children were told to move their hands into a particular position when doing an addition problem. The study demonstrated that gesturing can create new concepts.

Asking a yes/no question to someone who is contemplating lying tells the person the answer is not known - i.e. did your mom do this homework for you? Forming questions this way can alert a would-be-liar that the questioner does not know the answer and is fishing.

Women are much better at determining someone's immediate emotional state than men. This built-in deciphering ability is sometimes referred to as a "woman's intuition." Decoding implicit communication on the fly still does not make females any better at lie detection.

Prior to 2006 research showed people lied about 25 times a day. But researcher Robert Feldman found people lied even more. His experiments illustrated people, overall, lied about three times every ten minutes. Some subjects in his experiments lied as much as 12 times in ten minutes demonstrating that everyone lies and everyone lies all the time. An "honest" person is truly nonexistent.

Intent defines lying in the real world. By definition, in order for a person to be considered as "lying" they must know that what they are saying (or even doing) is not the truth. For example, if someone makes some sort of mistake in his story this would not be lying. If, however, that person intentionally places a 'mistake' in his story to make it appear more believable, this would be considered a lie because the 'mistake' was deliberate. A (genuine) slip-up does not activate the autonomic nervous system because the person does not know they slipped-up. When a person lies they know they are lying, thus, the ANS is activated e.g. there may be some sort of body movement such as touching the nose.

There are consistent findings in educational literature showing that kids with higher IQ's will lie less than those with lower IQ's. Scientists posit that smarter children don't need to make themselves look better (embellish) but kids with lower scores do, or feel they do, thus tend to lie more.