Unnecessary face touching shows emotional discomfort. When in the right context, it can signal a lie.
Self touching is one thing we habitually associate with liars. They touch their chin, neck, nose, ears or will pull their collar away from their neck. These traits are of course related to nervousness and the mistake we sometimes make is directly associating nervousness with lying. As we have seen, not all liars are nervous. Let’s break this category down a little more.
As we have seen liars are difficult to detect and sometimes body language is more of a distraction than a help, however, as mentioned throughout, most people still rely on visual cues and identify (at least in their mind) liars through their body language. While these cues are only sometimes useful in detecting lies, they are always valuable as cues to avoid if the desire is to appear honest and trustworthy in the eyes of others. In other words, here is a list of cues to avoid emitting yourself!
Unfortunately, you probably thought that I would be describing how easy it is to spot lies told by children, but the common theme in this chapter is held consistent. Being able to ‘look through our children’ is a common sentiment. We do think that children are bad liars overall, but studies show that children are nearly as, if not just as efficient at lying as adults. A 2007 study by Leif Strömwall, Pär Granhag and Sara Landström of Göteborg University in Sweden found that overall detection of lies in children was only around fifty-two percent, or not much better than chance. Adult raters were only slightly more effective at detecting children’s lies when the children were not allowed time to prepare their fibs. In this case they were only fifty-six percent accurate. The children relied on their own real life experiences and those of others they knew to fabricate believable stories, whereas their nonverbal strategy was to ‘stay calm’. Other research tells us that children as young as four are able to construct and build lies, but that older children are more skilled than younger children and are therefore caught even less. Another study showed that by age twelve, children have reached adult success levels. Further to this, there is no ‘expert advantage’ mean that when college students were compared to teachers and social workers, no difference was found, they all performed poorly as lie detectors.
Now let’s all breath deeply here! Children have a natural knack for telling lies, but so too does the rest of the world it seems. To catch our children’s lies it’s best to watch for their verbal inconsistencies rather than their nonverbal language. In fact, that is exactly what we do. Paying particular attention to the consistencies in the verbal dialogue is reported by several studies as successful where adults are trying to catch children in lies. To illustrate this point I draw on a 2002 study by Victoria Talwar and Kang Lee of Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario, Canada. In the study they had children hold a stuffed Barney toy behind their backs. As the experimenter left the room, they asked for them not to peek. Almost no one could resist the temptation. Raters who had no chance to interview or listen to children speak, but had to rely on body language alone, showed similar difficulty as other studies when trying to pick which of the children where lying. However, when outright asked if they peeked seventy-five percent lied and only twenty-five percent admitted to peeking, but when asked to guess what toy they held, almost half of the six and seven-year-olds said “Barney” admitting they had looked, whereas ninety percent of the three, four and five-year olds admitted the same. The study demonstrates that young liars are easily read by verbal leakage. Only some of the students where able to come up with alternative answers, or report that they didn’t know.
Another factor we look for in liars, is “richness of detail”’, meaning the level of information in a story. It is this richness that we assume means that someone has actually experienced the event, rather than constructed it. Children have limited life experience and it is difficult for them to create details outside of their personal lives. Then again, young children often give short responses to questions anyway and offer up little detail, even when prompted. Children have also been found to appear more nervous and seem to think harder when lying, the problem of course is that they hold these traits while telling the truth as well. Telling the truth is hard for both adults and children. Reality is as difficult to recall as is creating lies.
Adults, parents in particular who spend a great deal of time with their children, can usually pick out lies easier, because they’ve been with them to measure their experiences more so than the cues they give up through their body language. However this falls much shorter than lie detection, it’s merely an examination of the facts or at its most generous, a probability assessment. Parents most often rely on baseline comparisons in their children and while this is helpful, detecting lies in strangers or in other people’s children would be more useful. Teachers whom are faced with stories about summer vacations or their extravagance might hold doubts, but until they can confirm these doubts with facts, photographs or even parent’s confirmation, they simply remain doubts. Information presented outside the realm of the children’s possible experiences can be used to reasonably detect lies, but with widespread media and internet, story creation by children is made much easier. However, as the research shows repeatedly, we should not expect to be able to detect lies through body language alone, even in children.
In a 2004 study out of the University of Portsmouth by Samantha Mann, Aldert Vrij and Ray Bull it was found that police officers were sixty-five percent accurate in detecting lies when they watched the proceedings of an interrogation. This success rate is significantly higher than that which could arise by chance alone and also shows that familiarity with the subjects can have a role in increasing accuracy. Most research thus far has used college students, but this shows that police who frequently deal with suspects might have an advantage reading them over reading others. By a similarly notion, this advantage would theoretically be non-existent for police officers in a business meeting or with regard to a salesperson on a car lot, unless they had particular experience with such matters. This study does tell us that familiarity with the subject and the context can help us in detecting lies.
Police manuals give the impression that officers who interview suspects often, are good lie detectors, despite of course the vast research that says otherwise. When the researchers qualified their observations however, they found some surprising findings. Officers who named visual cues such as those mentioned in Inbau’s research, mentioned previously, which forms part of the manual on lie detection for police, such as gaze aversion, unnatural changes in posture, self touching, mouth and eye covering were less likely to be accurate in reading others. In fact, these cues proved counterproductive. Specifically, female participants who claimed to use Inbau’s cues most often where poorer at detecting truths, than the males who did not. In particular, gaze aversion was unhelpful and in fact distracting when analyzing for truth. So despite the moderate success of officers at detecting lies, there still remains severe shortcomings because it was not necessarily due to observations of body language or other anything else that could be described, catalogued, and hence put to use. If an inherent skill amounts to a sixty-five percent success, but one can’t describe that skill in a way that makes it useful to other people, then it simply appears like a hunch. Hunches are not reliable, nor do they meet the scientific principle of reproducibility or have predictive (useful) qualities.
It’s intuitive for most to think that the creation of lies is more difficult than telling the truth. For example, some think that the truth comes ready-made, we simply remove it from a box and present it, whereas lies have to be pieced together and manufactured so appear more difficult to construct. However, only sometimes this is true, other times recalling what really happened proves to be just as difficult. Sometimes the truth requires interpretation and other times the truth is hard to describe such as our opinion and feelings or in other cases is difficult to visualize such as when an event happens quickly. Our minds have built in selective memories making it hard to recall information that has happened in our past, particularly with respect to traumatic or discomforting events. Lies though always involved a deliberate and conscious aim to deliver information that is contrary to the truth, but as we know the truth is only sometimes easy to interpret. Lies can be constructed willy-nilly and can flow just as fast as the mind can imagine things, which, as we know, can happen instantly. This is what makes it only sometimes true that making up lies is more challenging than telling the truth.
Depending on how one puts information together, will depend on how others will interpret it as well. We can’t conceivable relay all events, as necessarily our information is censored for brevity. For example, one might describe a particularly uneventful day by saying that it was “fine” and then listing all the main events. However, what constitutes a main event anyway? Someone else might find something important in your day that you failed to mention, however, this doesn’t mean that the person is lying per se. Our minds are complex and quick, when we come up with simple lies, we can create them as fast as we can spite them out. Only when lies get very complicated do we see effects such as stuttering, pauses, speech errors or corrections. Keep in mind that only sometimes are truths prepackaged, but lies are always prepackaged. The length of time to construct them is just one factor. Quick and dirty lies might be shorter and contain only the main details, but so too might the truth. Thus, prompting for more information can sometimes lead to the method of the lie. It’s much easier to catch broad lies too and ones that fall outside the expertise of the teller precisely because they won’t be able to add relevant information from their experiences. Due to the skills we all naturally posses, we should only expect the telling of lies to be slightly more challenging to tell than the truth.
Keep in mind that microexpressions are useful when they appear out of congruency with other gestures or language. It is when the facial expression is out of tune with what is being said. For example, telling a positive story while smiling and momentarily flashing a microexpression can mean that the person is lying. Here are some microexpressions with respect to emotions. [note that images show true expressions which might be held for a time, whereas a microexpression will not persist, only flash quickly before disappearing]
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Anger: Lowering the brow, flaring of the eyes and tightening of the mouth.
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Fear: Raising the upper eyelids and showing the whites of the eyes, raising the inner brow and folding the eyebrows inward (activation of the grief muscle), lowering the brow and or tightening of the eyelid. A grimace usually comes across the face.
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Surprise: Straight upward lift of the brows.
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Disgust: Baring of the teeth, lower of the eyebrows, tightening the eyelid, and wrinkling the nose.
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Scorn: A combination of anger and disgust that happens by wrinkling of the nose, raising and tightening of the upper lip. To visualize this expression think of a bad smell.
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Reverse smile: While smiling the corners of the mouth curl downwards momentarily displaying a caught/suppressed frown.
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False smile: Where the eyes play no part (no wrinkles in the corners of the eyes as in the Duchenne smile and the mouth is stretched across the face).
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Doubt or disbelief: While answering a question in the affirmative saying “yes” the head is seen shaking from side-to-side in a ‘no-gesture.’
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Microexpressions, such as this furrowed forehead (a negative thought indicator) are called “leaked” because they happen quickly and last only fractions of a second before disappearing. Because they are difficult to control, they tend to be reliable indicators of truly felt emotions.
Microexpressions are facial movements or expressions that flash across the face at such a fast rate that they are barely perceivable. Slow motion replays of high speed videography easily shows what is difficult to see in real time. The persistence of these cues range from 1/25 to 1/5 of a second. It is the study of microexpressions that assumes that certain aspects of facial expressions reveal this duplicity to betray the liar. The research was originally pioneer by Guillaume Duchenne in the 1800s as we saw in an earlier chapter who discerned the difference between real and fake smiles from the use of the zygomatic major muscles which pull the corners of the mouth upward and the orbicularis oculi, the muscle around the eye that pulls the cheek up while lowering the brow. This was the true smile and in the same way, other unconscious microgestures reveal negative emotions. Presumably it is more difficult to prevent a felt emotion in addition to creating a false emotion than to simply neutralize the face. The term “masked” refers to any facial emotion that is either replaced by a different falsified expression, or is neutralized with no emotion present. This is when microexpressions should be most evident.
Microexpressions, on the other hand, are tied to leakage in so much as they are an attempt to hide our true feelings. When we tell a lie, and if we hold any remorse for that lie, repressed or otherwise, our faces should reveal these cues through facial expressions. When a deceiver tries to repress an emotion caused by lying, the result is a micro display that briefly comes across the face instead. Other times these cues happen at a much slower rate and are perceivable by the naked eye. Those that can intuitively detect lies often score high on the ability to recognize microexpressions.
Lies can be betrayed by signs of emotions as they relate to microexpressions or in other words, it is difficult for a liar to create emotions that don’t exist. For example, it is difficult to consciously narrow the red margins of the lips so this can be an indicator of feigned anger. Rarely do we detect these fake emotions though, which is partly due to the fact that we simply don’t care to know the truth as it serves no useful purpose to us; there is no reward or incentive.
A study conducted in 2008 by Stephen Porter and Leanne Brinke of Dalhouse University who examined microexpressions through the examination of high speed video cameras found some, but incomplete support, for their use in detecting feigned emotions. In fact the emotions they did uncover occurred over a much longer time which could suggest that they might be easier to detect than previously though. They also found that it was far easier to neutralize the face (show no expression) than to create an artificial emotion. In the neutral face, they found a lower blink rate, possibly due to the effects of claming up, but where a masked face appeared, they found increased blinking likely due to the stress associated with faking a face. Other studies suggest that liars increase blink rate, as we recall. They also found that all participants showed at least one inconsistent emotion during deception showing that leakage might be ubiquitous, but the overall success rate was still only sixty percent. Confusing the findings further, they found that microexpressions were found throughout positive emotions.
To date very little study has gone into microexpressions which is surprising given the widespread attention is had been given. It is currently being utilized as a massive foundation for the U.S. transportation agency to help identify suspicious passengers. While the science is incomplete with regards to microexpressions, it is important to realize their existence, real or not, because the next time we wait to board a plane, the eye in the sky and the personnel on the floor are eagerly watching for our nervous ticks for the opportunity to pull us aside for more questioning. The rational of course is that while nervous ticks might not accurately betray a liar all the time, it does form a basis to increase the level of investigation even if there are occasional misses. The (not too?) distant future might hold recognition software that reads all levels of being, from gait to blood pressure, voice inconsistencies and perhaps microexpressions. Most experts agree that this technology, due to its complex nature, won’t be in production for some time though.
Scientists have uncovered tics and flutters that can tell us when people aren’t telling us the truth. FACT or the Facial Action Coding System is a system that deals with forty-six facial movements classified into more than 10,000 microexpressions. The manual details how the face behaves based on the muscles that control it. The guide is a combination of still images, digital video and written descriptions and is of interest not only to lie detectors, but also to animators, computer scientists who create facial recognition software and other personnel who need to know how the face moves and why such as psychotherapists and interviewers.
According to its proponents FACT can detect deception with a seventy-six percent accuracy. According to researcher Paul Ekman, thousands of people have been trained to read these signals from transportation security to administrative personnel. In fact, FACS has been recently implemented in U.S. airports as terrorist-screening. In other words, you may want to look up FACS and avoid the expressions least you get pulled aside for an uncomfortable cavity search! FACS however, is by no means beginners reading material, however, the idea is to be able to codify the information into software that can then be interpreted by a human operator.
The most influential manual regarding suspect interviewing was written by Fred Inbau, Reid and Buckley in 2001 “Criminal interrogation and confession” and is the handbook used by police officers in training. The “Reid nine steps” claims that after being accused of having committed a crime, those under investigation who are innocent will tend to be more cooperative than deceptive when compared to guilty suspects. The theory says that honest suspects will cooperate and work harder to show their innocence, whereas the guilty will appear less cooperative, and so appear less convincing.
Inbau provides a few examples. He says that suspects who are guilty will want to exit the interview as quickly as possible. They will say things like “Well, I figured you wouldn’t believe me. It’s been nice talking to you but I have an attorney to see.” On the other hand, suspects who are innocent will not want to exit the interview room after being falsely accused so they will insist on remaining as long as possible to present the truth to the investigator. In fact, the manual states that innocent suspects, will remain until they have had the opportunity to present enough information to eliminate themselves as a suspect.
The argument of cooperation does seem plausible and some studies do support the argument, however others do not. One such study by Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom in 2005 showed that there was no relationship between cooperation and guilt. He found that suspects who were shy tended to cooperate less despite their guilt or innocence. Therefore by Inbau’s logic would be falsely labeled as guilty. At issue here are many factors and ones that need to be considered before anyone can be labeled as a liar or otherwise. Deceivers are just as likely to be concerned with the impressions they make as non-deceivers so this is non-issue. However, the context does come across as a big factor.
For example, a criminal at a boarder crossing who is moving drugs with a suitcase would obviously be unwilling to cooperate by opening his bag so as to delay being caught, but so too might someone holding particularly private or personal items. Lest we not forget about a human rights activist who’s occupation involves protecting the freedoms of people. The activists will be just as unlikely to cooperate with law enforcement since his goals are best served by drawing attention to the injustices around him. What better way to make a point about global big brother than to become a victim yourself. Liars on the other hand might try harder to appear more honest by cooperating, or show that they have nothing to fear, and even appeal to discrimination and unjustness of the process. In the case of the honest suspect, they aren’t concerned about the impression they make on others, so can also appear less cooperative, even combative. Thus, cooperation, in and of itself, does not lead necessarily indicate deception, but on the surface, has some merit.
A review of the literature on lying and truth telling shows us that an average sixty-seven percent accuracy is found when detecting the truth, whereas forty-four percent is found while detecting deception. In other words, people’s accuracy at detecting truths is usually higher than their accuracy at detecting lies! This is what is called the truth bias. Some possible explanations for the truth bias stem from the fact that in everyday encounters we usually deal with honest people. While lying is pervasive, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as does lying. Thus, we expect people to be telling the truth and are therefore better at detecting it.
Another possible reason for our inherent truth bias is because it would be detrimental to act suspiciously while speaking with others just in case they were telling the truth. If our default was to label other people as deceptive, we’d be constantly interrupting others to clarify statements, or our suspicion would have our minds busy fact checking at a later time. Our conversations would be littered with statements such as ‘That can’t be true’ or ‘Really, I can’t see that’ or ‘I’ll believe that when I see it’ which sometimes it is, but usually not. This would be time consuming and counterproductive given the nature of real to life situations, that is that people normally tell the truth. Our social rules also do not permit us to act suspiciously and if we did so would alienate others and prevent us from formulating alliances or friendships. In fact, ignoring the faults of others is the primary reason we allow ourselves to associate with anyone at all. Those with a memory for detail find it hard to ‘let things go’ or ‘ignore subtle unimportant flaws’ which can be detrimental for relationships. The truth bias tells us that letting little ‘white lies’ go, is an integral part of human nature, perhaps even necessary.