When the stakes are high emotions in the face and voice may give away hard-to-spot liars. As this ScienCentral News video reports, one researcher studying deception for the military is finding information that will be helpful in love and war.
Liar, Liar
Carved out in our collective imagination is a carpenter's workshop in the Italian story "Pinocchio," where a wooden puppet with an ever-growing nose informs millions of children what might happen if they lie. In real life, who hasn't wished the liars in their world were as transparent? The good news is that researchers are finding clues in the body that—with the right training—might tell you how to spot when someone's trying to pull a fast one.
Psychologist Paul Ekman, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco is working with the Department of Defense on software that analyzes facial muscles to help detect liars. "There are movements of the face that can show an emotion that doesn't fit with what the person's saying," Ekman explains. "We call that a 'hot spot,' which means that you are not getting a full account."
To first prove that people's faces differ when they lie, Ekman videotaped 11 men truthfully discussing a topic they felt strongly about and nine men lying about their stance. Volunteers watched the tapes and tried to spot liars. Ekman reported that 90 percent of the liars' faces showed fear and disgust whereas only 30 percent of truth tellers displayed these emotions. He calls these concealed emotions 'microexpressions.' "They look just like ordinary expressions except that they are on the face for about a 25th of a second," explains Ekman.
Catching these transitory glimpses—some disguised as fearful wide eyes or a disgusted wrinkled up nose—is tough, but not impossible, and almost anybody can be trained to spot them, Ekman says. But once detected, he warns that you have to be careful not to misinterpret the signals. "Some people will show microexpressions about emotions they're feeling from being questioned not relevant to whether or not they committed a crime," he explains, offering this example: If someone's wife was murdered and the police were interrogating the husband, that man might show anger that wouldn't stem from guilt. Instead, he'd be irritated that the police were wasting time on him or accusing him.
The complicated nature of human emotion makes facial expression weak as a standalone tool, Ekman cautions, and suggests combining face readings with verbal cues. Get a person talking, and the easier it is to pick up discrepancies in their story, he says. "We have found a powerful correlation between the number of words spoken and the ease [with which] you can evaluate truthfulness," he explains.
What makes Ekman so sure of something seemingly so unscientific? He's spent over 40 years studying deception, including a 1967 stint in Papua New Guinea, where he went to prove Charles Darwin's assumption that facial expressions are universal in people. He studied the Fore, a tribe that exists in relative isolation, uninfluenced by movies, television or magazines. As he showed Fore photographs of people's faces, they matched scenarios like the death of a child to expressions in the photos. Then, Ekman categorized the responses into roughly seven states—sadness, surprise, anger, contempt, disgust, fear and happiness.
Over time, Ekman's trained hundreds of police and FBI agents how to interpret microexpressions in suspects to inform their interrogations. But he reminds them that the old adage "practice makes perfect" holds true for liars whose stories become more believable with every retelling. Ekman's advice? Get to the suspect quickly, before they have time to rehearse.
Ekman is confident that his system can help interrogators. "Think of the microexpression as pliers," he says. "You want to have a plier in your toolbox but it doesn't mean you don't want a screwdriver and a hammer. We're trying to develop screwdrivers and hammers in addition to the pliers that are already developed."
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