People aren’t very good at detecting liars. Studies show that people’s hit rate for detecting lies (54%) is slightly above pure chance (50%), which is good news for the liars, but bad news for you in the courtroom.
Why? Because people tend to pay attention to certain cues to determine if someone is lying, but these cues may mean something entirely different.
Take the “vocal immediacy” cue, for example. Vocal immediacy is the directness with which someone responds to a question. The more roundabout or vague the response, the more likely jurors will figure your witness is lying. However, your witness may simply be thinking out loud, which sounds roundabout. Or your witness may not know what to say, and rather than answer truthfully “I don’t know,” or “I don’t understand the question,” may resort to a vague mulling over what to respond, which again, looks like lying.
Another cue is “uncooperativeness.” People often assume that a person being uncooperative is hiding something, being dishonest. Yet often an uncooperative witness is one who argues with opposing counsel rather than answer the question asked, or attempts to force their view of the facts into every response, rather than let their own attorney do the litigating.
Your best witness—among other things—responds directly to the question asked, and leaves the lawyering up to the lawyer.
The best tool I know to help your witnesses get up to
jury-worthy credibility is to use role-play in preparing them to testify. You
can’t afford to let your witnesses get away with behaviors that could be
mistaken by the jurors as those of a liar.
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