Liespotting_Proven Techniques to Detect Deception

by Pamela Meyer

  To Protect Another Person from Being Punished. Taking the blame for someone else’s mistake is a classic lie. So is providing an alibi. Both types of deception seem to have been used on behalf of presidential candidate John Edwards in 2007. When word leaked that Edwards’s former campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter, was pregnant, a close aide of the senator’s, Andrew Young, claimed to be the baby’s father. Young has since renounced the statement and no longer works for Edwards. Young later said that one of his duties had been to set up clandestine meetings between Edwards and Hunter.31

  To Protect Yourself from the Threat of Physical or Emotional Harm. Hopefully you don’t often need to lie in order to protect yourself physically. Many of us, however, lie to protect ourselves emotionally. “No one deserved that promotion more than Carol,” we’ll say when we were passed over for the same job. Or, “It’s great that the rest of the team goes out to lunch so often, but I get a lot done by eating at my desk.”

  To Get Out of an Awkward Social Situation. Many busy executives habitually arrange for their assistants to knock on their door thirty minutes into a meeting to say, “Next meeting is starting!” or “Alice needs you right away.”

  To Maintain Privacy. A CEO might prefer to say he’s resigning for personal reasons rather than admit that he’s actually being asked to step down. Or, to give an entirely fictional example, the head of a multinational corporation that manufactures software products and consumer electronics might insist he’s in perfect health when he’s actually looking for a new liver.32

  When it comes to identifying a lie, motive and context matter. A wink, for example, cannot be understood out of context. Motives such as protecting one’s privacy, avoiding harm, or dodging an awkward social situation are clearly more forgivable than others. By remembering these nine common reasons for lying, we better identify situations in which we need to turn up our liespotting radar. Keeping them in mind may also help us fight our own truth-stretching impulses.

  IS SOMEONE LYING TO YOU?

  We tend to think we’ll know deception when we hear it. But not only do people miss the lies they hear, they don’t actually recognize many of the lies they tell. As we saw in Chapter 1, the average person tells a lot of lies in a day—sometimes without realizing it, and often without intending to do harm. Lying seems to be a routine part of our daily existence.

  University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman conducted an experiment in which he brought two strangers together and videotaped them getting to know each other for ten minutes. Afterward he asked the subjects to watch the tape and indicate when they said something that was “not entirely accurate.” Most participants initially asserted that they had been entirely truthful during their conversation. In fact, though, 60 percent had distorted the truth at least once during those ten minutes—most of them without even realizing it. In one case, a participant had flat-out lied by claiming to be the lead singer in a rock band.

  How is it possible to lie without knowing it? “People lie almost reflexively,” Feldman says. “They don’t think about it as part of their normal social discourse.” He adds that generally, we’re not trying to impress other people but to present a view of ourselves that matches what they would like us to be.33

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  LIESPOTTING TIP

  People will often subconsciously touch or try to cover their eyes when being deceptive. Men tend to rub their eyes, while women are more likely to touch gently below their eyes—an attempt to “see no evil.”

  *

  SO WHAT IS A LIE?

  Most of us want to think of ourselves as honest. The participants in Feldman’s experiment wouldn’t describe themselves as chronic liars, despite the evidence that they lie—or that they offer inaccuracies far more often than they realize. After all, isn’t it possible that one person’s lie is another person’s polite agreement? We’ll leave the debate over the morality of different types of lies to philosophers and theologians. Instead, let’s concentrate on finding an objective definition of what constitutes a lie.

  Talmudic scholars identified lies as geneivat da’at, “the theft of one’s mind, wisdom, or knowledge.”34 St. Augustine believed that a lie occurs when we “hold one thing in our heart and say another.”35 Modern-day social scientists, in an attempt to disengage from the moral ambiguity and emotional weight that can surround deception, have established four defining criteria for a lie.36 Though he’s not the best model for twelve-year-old boys aspiring to the big leagues, Pete Rose—who was banned from baseball and made ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame for betting on games (which he finally admitted to in 2004, after years of denials)—gave us excellent examples of those four requirements.37

  1. A Lie Must Include a False Statement or Appearance. Rose lied both in words and actions, making false statements that he “never bet on baseball,” and conveying the appearance that he wasn’t betting on games.

  2. A Lie Must Have a Recipient; Otherwise It Is Self-Deception. Whether by commission or omission, Rose lied to his teammates, his fans, journalists, and Major League Baseball. He may have also been deceiving himself, but we’ll leave that to his psychoanalyst.

  3. A Lie Requires the Intent to Deceive; Otherwise It’s an Honest Mistake. Rose knew that betting on baseball was against the rules. He concealed his behavior so that he wouldn’t get caught.

  4. A Lie Requires a Context of Truth. Sometimes people are willing to suspend their disbelief. The audience in a movie theater knows that a car chase that takes the characters across all of New York City would last longer than two minutes. A magic show would be a sordid affair if the crowd didn’t trust that the woman being sawed in half was actually going to survive. The public and the media, however, expected Pete Rose to behave honestly and to tell the truth.

  In sum, the scientific definition of a lie is as follows: A message knowingly transmitted to another person with the intent to foster false beliefs or conclusions and without prior notification of purpose.38

  LIE DETECTION THROUGH THE AGES

  Though researchers rely on objective criteria to study deception, lies are of course highly emotional constructs. Avoiding punishment, protecting another person, maneuvering for power, even preserving one’s privacy—these represent primal, visceral desires. It’s no wonder that the biggest advancements in lie-detection research occurred once scientists, doctors, and other creative thinkers broadened their focus to include not only the anatomical details of what happens to our faces and bodies when we lie, but also which emotions those details reveal.

  Seeking Tremors in the Blood: Defoe to Marston

  Though Wonder Woman comic-book author, psychologist, and inventor William Marston’s systolic blood-pressure test, which would lay the groundwork for the modern polygraph, was invented in the early twentieth century, it was another writer—Daniel Defoe, the British author of Robinson Crusoe—who first posited almost two hundred years earlier that liars’ bodies might give them away by exposing their emotional state. Defoe’s fascination with street crime had led him to write several novels with rogues and prostitutes as the protagonists, and he asserted that a thief could be identified by measuring his heightened pulse. “Guilt always carries fear around with it,” said Defoe. “There is a tremor in the blood…that, if attended to, would effectually discover him.”39

  Linking Expression and Emotion: Duchenne, Darwin, and Freud

  A leap in deception detection occurred in the 1840s, when French physician Guillaume Duchenne began studying the physiology of facial expressions. Duchenne identified the physical difference between a false or “social” smile—one made consciously, using only the mouth muscles—and a genuine, spontaneous smile made involuntarily, using the muscles of both the eyes and the mouth.40 In his honor, genuine smiles are now called “Duchenne smiles.” Fake smiles, on the other hand, are sometimes called “Pan Am smiles,” a mock tribute to the flight attendants portrayed in early TV commercials.

  *

  IT’S HARD TO FAKE A
SMILE

  Only one in ten people can voluntarily control the muscles around the eye sockets so well as to fake a true smile.41 Today, an insincere, non-Duchenne smile is still considered one of the most common indicators of deception.

  *

  Though Duchenne’s work concentrated exclusively on the anatomy of facial expressions and not on the underlying emotions that caused them, his research was pivotal in connecting the two. Thirty years after Duchenne first began his experiments, Charles Darwin praised Duchenne’s work and credited much of his photographic work with helping him develop the ideas he published in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. During his travels, Darwin noticed that people of different races and cultures expressed certain basic emotions—particularly rage and happiness—in the same way.42 He concluded that “all the chief expressions exhibited by man are the same throughout the world.”43

  Building on the growing evidence that our body and emotions interact in more revealing ways than had been previously realized, Sigmund Freud began to explore the idea that these basic emotions might “leak” into nonverbal behavior and therefore signal deception. In 1905, Freud wrote: “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him from every pore.”44 He also believed that verbal mistakes—“Freudian slips”—could signal a person’s attempt to lie.45

  Cracking the Code: Tomkins and Ekman

  In the end, it was two twentieth-century American psychologists who galvanized the modern phase of deception research. Silvan Tomkins, a psychology professor at Prince ton and Rutgers, had an uncanny ability to read the face. Unable to find a job during the Great Depression, he made a living as a racing handicapper, a skill he claimed was due to his ability to read horses’ faces as well as those of humans. It was said that Tomkins could walk into a post office, briefly examine the faces on the “Wanted” posters on the wall, and correctly identify the crime each person had committed.

  At a time when few social scientists were studying human emotion, Tomkins posited that emotion, not cognition or behavior, lay at the center of human experience. In his massive four-volume work, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Tomkins introduced the concept of affect theory, in which affects, or “biological emotions,” could be detected through facial reactions that appeared even before the subject was conscious of feeling a given emotion. Emotion, Tomkins believed, was “the code to life,” and “with enough attention to particulars, the code could be cracked.”46

  Though Tomkins was acknowledged as a brilliant researcher and theorist, his assertion of the primacy of emotion and expression to the human experience did not gain traction until it was championed—and then used as a springboard—by a young psychologist named Paul Ekman.

  Ekman began his scientific career studying body movements—hand gestures, in particular. He only began examining faces after receiving a grant for cross-cultural studies of non verbal behaviors. Ekman wrote:

  I had not sought the grant, but because of a scandal—a research project being used to camouflage counter-insurgency activity—a major [Department of Defense] project was canceled and the money budgeted for it had to be spent during that fiscal year on overseas research, and on something noncontroversial. By accident I happened to walk into the office of the man who had to spend the funds. He was married to a woman from Thailand and was impressed by differences in their nonverbal communication. He wanted me to find out what was universal and what was culturally variable. I was reluctant at first, but I couldn’t walk away from the challenge.47

  Ekman was thirty years old at the time. The journey he took led him to two of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.

  THREE

  READING THE FACE

  The mouth may lie, but the face it makes nonetheless tells the truth.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  The first rule in deception detection is to watch the face.

  It may seem obvious, yet the widely accepted idea that our facial expressions are directly connected to our thoughts and emotions—including our hidden and subconscious thoughts and emotions—only took root forty years ago. Imagine how history might have been different had we understood the concept sooner. What if during their 1938 negotiations, Chamberlain had been able to read in Hitler’s face that the führer had every intention of invading Czechoslovakia, despite making assurances that he would not? If only one of Madoff’s investors, or the investigators from the SEC, could have read the deceit in his smile as he assured them that the billions of dollars he was handling were safe. The systematic study of face reading is so new that we’re only beginning to realize how useful it can be.

  THE FIRST BREAKTHROUGH

  Charles Darwin believed that facial expressions were biologically determined and identical across all cultures. In his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin explored such topics as “Gradation from loud laughter to gentle smiling” and “Shame, from broken moral laws and conventional rules.”1 In addition to a detailed study of the physiological causes of expression—with photographs as illustrations, a novelty at the time—Darwin introduced his conviction that human expressions were the same in every person.

  It has often struck me as a curious fact that so many shades of expression are instantly recognized without any conscious process of analysis on our part. No one, I believe, can clearly describe a sullen or sly expression; yet many observers are unanimous that these expressions can be recognized in the various races of man. Almost everyone to whom I showed Duchenne’s photograph of the young man with oblique eyebrows…at once declared that it expressed grief or some such feeling; yet probably not one of these persons, or one out of a thousand persons, could beforehand have told anything precise about the obliquity of the eyebrows with their inner ends puckered, or about the rectangular furrows on the forehead…. I have endeavored to show in considerable detail that all the chief expressions exhibited by man are the same throughout the world.2

  Darwin was always willing to use members of his family as subjects, and he made an especially close observation of his first child, William.

  It is however extremely difficult to prove that our children instinctively recognize any expression. I attended to this point in my first-born infant, who could not have learnt anything by associating with other children, and I was convinced that he understood a smile and received plea sure from seeing one, answering it by another, at much too early an age to have learnt anything by experience. When this child was about four months old, I made in his presence many odd noises and strange grimaces, and tried to look savage; but the noises, if not too loud, as well as the grimaces, were all taken as good jokes; and I attributed this at the time to their being preceded or accompanied by smiles. When five months old, he seemed to understand a compassionate expression and tone of voice. When a few days over six months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of the mouth strongly depressed; now this child could rarely have seen any other child crying, and never a grown-up person crying, and I should doubt whether at so early an age he could have reasoned on the subject. Therefore it seems to me that an innate feeling must have told him that the pretended crying of his nurse expressed grief; and this through the instinct of sympathy excited grief in him.3

  Of course, this wasn’t the first time Darwin had brought up ideas that were unwelcome to the educated classes of the nineteenth century. Swallowing the facts of evolution had been hard enough; now it was suggested that human beings were even more closely related to animals. Facial expressions—such intimate proof of humanity’s subtle feelings and rich intelligence—didn’t seem quite so uniquely human if they were innate rather than learned.

  Although the first edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals sold out quickly, the ideas it put forth were slower to catch on. The general consensus in the scientific community by the mid-twentieth century was t
hat individual cultures develop their own sets of expressions and pass them down through generations via socialization and imitation. Leading anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Ray Birdwhistell argued that Darwin’s research was tainted with anthropomorphism, anecdotalism, and plain Western bias.4 In a 1970 interview, Birdwhistell, who had made a lifelong study of nonverbal communication, firmly stated, “There are no universal gestures. As far as we know, there is no single facial expression, stance or body position which conveys the same meaning in all societies.”5 Mead and Bateson worried that stressing biology over culture could lead to dangerous comparisons among peoples and among nations. In her 1972 autobiography, Mead mentioned her concern about “the very human tendency to associate particular traits with sex or age or race, physique or skin color, or with membership in one or another society, and then to make invidious comparisons based on such arbitrary associations.”6

  In the 1960s, a Boston University psychologist named William Condon came up with a study method that he named micro-analysis. Condon filmed brief interactions between two people, then studied the films frame by frame. (One four-and-a-half-second film took him a year and a half to study and wore out 130 copies of the film.) For each frame, Condon recorded the tiny movements made by the speakers as well as the split syllables of their speech. Each frame flashed by in one twenty-fifth of a second; the “k” in the word “ask” took up one forty-eighth of a second. Condon discovered that each speaker’s movements were synchronized with his speech. He also realized that each listener also synchronized his motions to the other’s speech. As he explained it, communication was like “a dance, with everyone engaged in intricate and shared moments across many subtle dimensions.”7