by Ian Leslie
That’s when people are looking for a lie. In everyday life we live with a ‘truth bias’. Unless there is a compelling reason to think somebody is lying, it doesn’t occur to us that they are. And why should it? The world would be a deeply unpleasant place if we were forced to consider that everything we hear could be a lie – indeed, as Browne’s Law tells us, society would be unworkable. But this, of course, is what gives the skilled liar a head start over the rest of us.
So what should we be on the lookout for? There have been endless investigations into this question, but no simple answer has been found. For one thing, different people have different ‘tells’; one person might blink rapidly; another might stare unblinkingly. The signs of lying also depend on the type of lie being told. When people tell complicated lies, they frequently pause more often and for longer and speak more slowly, but if the lie is simple or highly polished they tend to do the opposite. Bad liars sometimes exhibit the symptoms of discomfort we expect but, overall, liars are less likely to blink, to move their hands and feet, or to make elaborate gestures.
What’s clear is that, faced with a group of people and asked to identify the liar, you’d be better off picking the most charismatic and fluent person in the room rather than, as we’re inclined to, the shifty-looking mumbler in the corner. Lying requires high cognitive, emotional and social abilities. The best liars tend to be charming, empathetic, and capable of thinking several moves ahead of their interlocutor. Their testimony under interrogation is often more coherent than that of the average truth-teller because they have thought their story through. They are more likely to tell a story in chronological order, whereas honest people often present accounts in an improvised jumble, which strikes us as dishonest-sounding. If someone says they can’t remember things, we get suspicious, but actually, people who spontaneously correct themselves or say that there are details they can’t recall are as – or even more – likely to be truthful than those who spin a smooth and fluent narrative line. Having said that, really good liars will make deliberate mistakes, to simulate spontaneity.
Liars are more difficult to spot than we imagine and very skilful liars are almost impossible to see through. Practised liars identify their own giveaways (or the conventionally assumed giveaways) and teach themselves to avoid them. They also anticipate what others are looking for: to be a good liar, you don’t need to know which behaviours separate liars from truth-tellers so much as which behaviours people think separate them.
Just because there are no unassailably reliable signs of lying doesn’t mean our internal lie detectors can’t be honed and refined. There are two prominent schools of thought on where to look for a lie. One focuses on the liar’s face; the other on his words.
The Honest Face
There ain’t no way to hide your lyin’ eyes.
‘Lyin’ Eyes’ The Eagles
In 1967 Paul Ekman was approached by a group of psychiatrists from the Californian hospital in which he had been working to see if he could help them tell when suicidal patients were lying to them. Ekman, a psychologist, wasn’t sure that he could answer their question, but he remembered a reel of film in his possession that might offer some clues. Several years earlier, he had filmed forty psychiatric patients being interviewed by doctors. At least one of them, ‘Mary’, a forty-two-year-old housewife, had been captured in the act of lying.
Mary had attempted suicide three times, and only survived her last attempt after being rushed to hospital. At the end of a three-week stay she seemed happier, and asked for a weekend pass to see her family. After interviewing Mary and being convinced by her account of her frame of mind, her doctor agreed. Just before leaving, however, Mary confessed to the real reason she wanted to go: to make another attempt on her own life.
Ekman and his colleague Wallace Friesen played the tape of Mary’s exit interview over and over, searching for the signs of deceit that had escaped her doctor. They slowed the tape down and scrutinised Mary’s face as she explained how well she was feeling. Finally, they saw it: when Mary was asked about her plans for the future, a look of despair flashed across her face, so quickly that it was almost imperceptible at normal speed and difficult to catch even at quarter-speed. Mary’s face had betrayed her real feelings, perhaps before she even knew they existed.
The psychiatrists had come to Ekman in the first place because of his reputation as an expert on the expressive capacity of the human face. As a young psychologist in the early 1960s, he had set out to find evidence for a theory that was prevalent at the time amongst social scientists: that what people thought of as universal facial expressions were actually culturally constructed masks with no direct connection to human emotions. Indeed, according to the dominant school of psychology at the time, emotions themselves were of negligible importance to human behaviour, and unworthy of serious study.
Ekman travelled to a remote village in Papua New Guinea to meet the people of South Fore, a tribe who had very little contact with the people or culture of the West. With the help of a translator, he told them very simple stories that ended with somebody being happy, sad, or angry, and asked them to choose, from a selection of two or three different pictures, the facial expression that best suited what the person in the story was feeling. If Ekman could show that the villagers of Fore had a different facial repertoire to Americans, he would have found valuable empirical evidence for the theory.
But the tribespeople of Fore didn’t give Ekman what he expected. They recognised the expressions he showed them, identifying them just as an American or a German would, and they used the same expressions themselves. When acting out a humorous story, they flashed cheesy grins; when describing frightening hunting tales, they adopted Hitchcockian poses. Ekman’s hypothesis was turned on its head. As he said forty years later, ‘I was dead wrong, and it was the most exciting discovery of my life.’
Back home, the academic establishment didn’t embrace Ekman’s findings, and he found himself gravitating towards an unconventional mentor: Silvan Tomkins. Born in Pennsylvania in 1911, Tomkins was the brilliant, charismatic, intellectually voracious son of a Russian dentist. He studied playwriting at the University of Pennsylvania but soon became absorbed by the young science of psychology. He left Philadelphia in 1934 and, unable to find scholarly employment in the midst of the Great Depression, spent the next two years working as a handicapper for a horse-racing syndicate. Tomkins’s system was based on his reading of the horses’ emotional relationship with each other. For instance, if a male horse had lost to a mare in his first or second year, he would be unsettled if he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the line-up. Nobody was quite sure whether or how it worked, but somehow he seemed to get results.
Unlike his contemporaries, Tomkins was interested in the emotions of human beings, too. While teaching psychology at Princeton and Rutgers he produced a comprehensive theory of the emotions in a four-volume work called Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. His greatest preoccupation was with how the human face displayed emotion, a subject that had also fascinated Charles Darwin. In 1872 Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he noted that ‘the same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity.’ Darwin was the first to ask whether facial expressions of emotion are innate – biologically determined; or learnt – culturally determined. Twentieth-century social scientists were firmly of the latter view – except for Tomkins, and now Ekman.
One day, towards the end of the Sixties, Ekman came across a treasure: a hundred-thousand feet of film, shot by a virologist in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Some of the footage was of the South Fore tribe he had visited; the rest was of the Kukukuku. The Fore were a peaceful and friendly people; the Kukukuku had a reputation for being hostile and murderous. For six months, Ekman sorted through the footage, cutting extraneous scenes and focusing on close-ups of the faces of the tribesmen. When a final cut was ready, he called in Tomkins. The
two men watched the film in silence. Ekman had told Tomkins nothing about the tribes involved, and all identifying context had been edited out. At the end, Tomkins went up to the screen and pointed at the faces of the South Fore. ‘These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful,’ he said. Then, pointing to the Kukukuku, he said, ‘This group is violent.’ Ekman was stunned. ‘How on earth are you doing that?’ he asked. As they played the film backwards in slow motion, Tomkins pointed out the particular wrinkles and bulges in the faces that he was using to make his judgements.
Ekman started to see the face as a gold mine of information about the human condition. Together with his collaborator Wallace Friesen, he embarked on a vast, quixotic undertaking: to create a comprehensive taxonomy of human expressions. The two men combed through medical textbooks, outlining each of the forty-three facial muscles and identifying every distinct muscular movement that the face could make. Then they made faces at each other across a desk, systematically manipulating their facial muscles into different combinations, checking each one in a mirror, and videotaping themselves for the record. If they found a particular movement impossible to execute they went next door to the anatomy department where a friendly surgeon would jumpstart the dormant muscle with a needle. They called each distinct muscular movement an ‘action unit’.
In time, the two researchers discovered and codified ten thousand facial expressions, all made up of different combinations of action units. Most of the expressions were meaningless – the kind of face a child might make in play. But about three thousand of them seemed to mean something. After seven years of research, Ekman and Friesen had catalogued the emotional repertoire of the human face, which they published in a document called the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS, still used by psychologists today. Each expression the human face is capable of is numbered, its movement described muscle by muscle, its emotional ‘meaning’ labelled. Action unit (AU) 12, which activates the zygomatic major, is a smile. Combine it with AU 6, which contracts the muscles that raise the cheek, and you have an expression of happiness. Sadness is defined as: AU 1+4+6+11, which means, ‘the inner corners of the brows drawn together and upward, cheeks raised, slight deepening of the nasolabial fold, and slight depression of the lip corners.’ Ekman points out that Woody Allen will raise the inner corner of his eyebrows whilst drawing his eyebrows down and together (AU1+4), in an expression of sadness that somehow makes his punchlines more poignant.
Thanks to Ekman’s research, the universality of facial expression is now generally accepted by social scientists. Outside academia, he is best known for his insights into deception. The nineteenth-century neurologist Guillaume Duchenne was the first to note how difficult it is to fake a facial expression. An authentic smile, he said, ‘does not obey the will’; its absence ‘unmasks the false friend’. Ekman’s intricate mapping of the facial repertoire enabled him to define precisely why it is that even when we make a good effort at putting on our best or our worst face, we can’t quite convince the careful observer. If we activate our zygomatic major without contracting our cheek muscles or scrunch-ing our eyes, our smile seems lifeless. A ‘felt happy smile’ typically features ‘apex coordination’, with the eye closure reaching its maximum intensity at the same time the grin is at its broadest. Real smiles are also shorter and smoother in execution than anxious or faked varieties. Authentic expressions of anger are even harder to create voluntarily (Adolf Hitler was unusually good at faking rage) and the negative emotions are generally tougher to fake than the positive ones. We might bare our teeth, but we rarely remember to narrow the red margin of the lips – or even if we remember, we can’t do it. Unless we’re truly angry.
After watching the tape of Mary’s exit interview, Ekman realised something even more remarkable: emotional expressions aren’t just hard to fake; they are almost impossible to conceal. This was the revelation that stimulated his interest in lying and lie detection. Liars need to put on what Macbeth calls a ‘false face’ consistent with the lie, and good liars can do this without much difficulty. But even the most skilful liars, Ekman came to believe, can exhibit a ‘leakage’ of emotional truth, by unconsciously making a facial expression incongruous with the story they are telling. For a fraction of a second, the honest face disrupts the false face. Ekman terms these fleeting expressions of involuntary emotion ‘microexpressions’. He frequently reminds people that a microexpression, even if you can spot it, is not necessarily the sign of a lie. It simply signals an emotional incongruity: you still have to figure out what it means, and whether it’s significant.
These days Ekman teaches his face-reading techniques to police investigators, embassy officials and military intelligence officers. In these sessions, he begins by showing photos of faces in neutral poses on a computer screen. A microexpression appears for forty milliseconds and the student has to press a button to indicate which emotion it displayed: fear, anger, surprise happiness, sadness, contempt or disgust. Without training, they are invisible; with it, says Ekman, people greatly improve their ability to spot them.
Of course, we have a voluntary muscular system and thus a degree of control over our facial responses. Most of the time we can fake a smile well enough. But the more we are emotionally involved in a falsehood, and the higher the stakes – that’s to say, the worse the consequences of being found out – the more likely it is that our face will give us away to the trained observer. It seems to have a mind of its own.
Silvan Tomkins used to open his lectures by declaring, ‘The face is like a penis!’
False Speech
We’ve already seen that most of us aren’t as good as we think we are at distinguishing truth from lies. You might expect that those whose jobs rely on making such distinctions would be better at it. According to Bond and DePaulo’s meta-analysis, however, psychiatrists, judges, custom officials and policemen score no more highly than the general public on tests of lie-detecting ability.
Aldert Vrij, a professor at Portsmouth University and the author of Detecting Lies and Deceit, a seminal book in the field of deception research, believes that professional lie catchers, like most of us, focus too much on the stereotypical physical signs of deception and fail to pay enough attention to verbal ones. Some people, says Vrij, have a naturally ‘dishonest’ demeanour even when they’re telling the truth; conversely, those with a naturally ‘honest’ demeanour can get away with a lot more. He cites the case of a Florida man, who became a prime suspect in a murder case after he appeared to be flushed in the face and embarrassed during his police interview. He was later found to be innocent.
If Ekman’s research focuses on the signs of emotional stress experienced by a liar, Vrij is more interested in the effects of the mental strain that a lie imposes on the person telling it – their ‘cognitive load’ – and in particular the manifestation of this strain in the liar’s speech.
He believes that the tried and trusted methods used by police interviewers are seriously flawed. In their day-to-day work, says Vrij, the police often assume that if somebody is surly and uncooperative then they’re probably lying. But his research indicates that because liars are concerned about not being believed, they are likely to come across as more helpful than truthful people during an interview. Another problem is that some police interrogators, following in the tradition of Gene Hunt from Life On Mars, charge aggressively into interviews, accusing the suspect of guilt from the off. Vrij’s work suggests that such attempts to break down the defences of the suspect only strengthen them, because they shut down the conversation; the suspect, feeling threatened, makes short answers or clams up altogether. The more talking they have to do, the more mental effort they have to make, and thus the more likely they are to incriminate themselves. Vrij argues that the way to catch a liar is to make them talk more, not less.
The police interrogation guidelines aren’t much help. The official manuals recommend several strategies to help interviewers decide whethe
r they are being told the truth. The principal one focuses on visual signs, such as whether the suspect is making eye contact, or fidgeting a lot. But, as we’ve seen, there’s little evidence that these cues are reliable. Another recommended approach, the Baseline Method, involves comparing a suspect’s language and demeanour during small talk at the beginning of the interview with those they use in the interview proper. But, says Vrij, people naturally adopt different modes of talking at different points – whether or not they’re telling the truth. A third approach, the Behavioural Analysis Interview (BAI) strategy, comprises a list of questions to which, it is suggested, liars and truth-tellers will give different responses. Again, there’s sparse evidence that this works, says Vrij, and neither do the guidelines address the fact that the police, like the rest of us, carry around a host of unconscious prejudices. It’s been shown that suspects are less likely to be believed if they have a foreign accent, and more likely to be believed if they’re attractive, baby-faced, socially adept and articulate – even though these two last traits have been found to be specifically associated with good liars.
So what should the police be looking for? As we’ve established, lying is effortful. Liars have to think of plausible answers under questioning; they need to avoid contradicting themselves; they need to tell a story that is consistent with what their interrogator already knows; they must try to avoid revealing slips of the tongue; they have to remember what they’ve said in case they’re asked to repeat it. Whilst they’re doing this they also have to be monitoring their own speech and body language to ensure they’re not giving themselves away, even as they know that if they show any signs of all the effort they’re putting in then they will arouse suspicion. Vrij’s preferred strategy is to increase the liar’s cognitive load to the point where they simply can’t manage to perform the mental juggling act.
