Thank you for some interesting comments everyone.
There's a lot of stuff out there, and different states have different training mandates. For example, Virginia is still requiring that recruits be taught about eye movement cues -- which was
misunderstanding of the work they pulled it from. It's a major element in most interview and interrogation training.
That is interesting; eye movement has never been shown to be a reliable predictor of truthfulness. As you say, it is a complete myth, so it is curious that it is still taught in the absence of evidence.
When it comes to lying, everyone wants it broken down into simple things. Like, if they do X, Y or Z than you know they are lying. There isn't anything that is consistant.
Also, people "shade the truth" to protect themselves, so while not outright lying, you are not getting the information you seek. The last school I went to (Reid interview and interogation) spent alot of time on "dishonest clues". Or things that someone isn't being completly truthful on, but you don't know why. For example, you are questioning an employee about a crime in which someone from business embezzled a large amount of money. The worker used some company supplies for personal use and feels really guilty because they don't normally do that kind of thing. Even though you are questioning him on something completely unrelated, he may give dishonest answers or "act like he is trying to hide something" because he is and thinks that you are trying to catch him at what he did.
Another problem is that a lot of the consistent cues of dishonesty are consistent with other factors as well, such as the obvious stress at being questioned. Interestingly, in the research I mentioned, the only group of professionals who could detect deception at statistically significant levels were USSS agents. My lecturer says that it is unclear what this means exactly, as training for lie detection is very difficult and generally does little to help. It is easier to learn to lie convincingly than detect lies.
I once dated and got engaged to a rather beautiful woman who was a teacher and there were times she insisted I was lying because I looked a certain direction and I can guarantee I was not lying but she never believed me because she had training in it. This is one of the many reasons why we are no longer together.
I was later reading about left vs. right brain dominance and it was discussing the way Right Brained dominate people answer a technical question and it said they tend to look whatever direction it was I was looking to engage the left brain. That was also the time that I discovered that, if there is such a thing, I am right brain dominant.
I have read that looking upwards in a certain direction indicates that you are either making something up (left) or accessing memory (right). This is supposedly because your right hemisphere (more artistic, creative etc) is being accessed and codes movements for the left side of your body (each hemisphere is connected to the opposite half of the body). I don't know how true this is, as I cannot remember where I read it but that is what I've heard. Sounds a bit dodgy as accessing your memory should not cause you to access the left hemisphere as far as psychologists can tell. The hippocampus which seems to be the main memory centre is located near the middle of the brain rather than in any distinct hemisphere.
It's sometimes hard to tell. A lot depends on time. People act differently when an incident just happened as opposed to if you're talking to them for the first time a couple days later. Some people lie very convincingly when they've had time to relax, some people talk themselves into believing a thought was a fact because it makes it easier for themselves to deal with what happened. Some people can't lie at all, they couldn't even lie to their cat.
And not all of us detect lies the same way, there's guys and gals that have better B.S. detectors than we'll ever have. And there are some guys who all you have to do is look at them and you know they're not telling the truth because they haven't for ten years. Not even during their 62 arrests, all of which were mistakes of course.
The only sure way I have of knowing if a person is lying - if their running for an elected office.
Research into the area has shown that there are no significant differences in people detecting lies; nobody has found to be better than anyone else, everyone is quite rubbish.
As the saying goes (I'll go for saying rather than joke):
How do you know if a politician is lying?
They open their mouth and sounds come out.
When you interview witnesses you can have widely different statements of the same event, it doesn't mean anyone is lying, it means everyone processes things that happen in different ways and can actually 'see' an incident differently. If someone is shot you will have a witness who tells you they heard the shot even if it's proved impossible for them to have done so but they aren't lying, to them they did hear it because their brain has told them that, putting two and two together and making five.
Yes, indeed, memory is extremely tricky. An interesting case was in Australia where a woman was raped and it transpired that the suspect was someone who was on television at the time. Ironically, it was a cognitive psychologist on a talk show speaking about memory and the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The victim was sure that he was the attacker, and was not lying but completely misperceived events.
check out Ekman's website and his newsletter:
www.paulekman.com. I studied cultural anthropology under one of Ekman's colleagues
and we went through his research carefully. His training (FACE) is not simple or superficial and can't be learned in one or two quick lessons.
F.A.C.E
(Facial Expression.Awareness.Compassion.Emotions.)
F.A.C.E. provides information about how to learn to recognize signs of emotion in the face. The Micro Expression Training Tool (METT) teaches recognition of concealed emotions through two kinds of training. This first kind of training is in slowed motion. It compares and contrasts the emotions that are most often confused with each other – anger and disgust, fear and surprise, fear and sadness, — with a commentary about just how each pair of emotions differ, which can be used at this slow speed to benefit people with aspergers or autism. The second kind of training METT provides is practice in recognizing micros. In each practice item a different person appears. He or she first shows no expression; then, suddenly a facial expression of one of seven emotions appears very briefly, immediately returning back to the expressionless face. After each quickly flashed expression the learners must choose which of the seven emotions was displayed: anger, fear, disgust, contempt, sadness, surprise or happiness.
The Subtle Expression Training Tool (SETT) teaches recognition of very small, micro signs of emotion. These are very tiny expressions, sometimes registering in only part of the face, or when the expression is shown across the entire face, but is very small. Subtle expressions occur for many reasons. The emotion experienced may be very slight ; they also occur when an emotion is just beginning, becoming larger if it is felt strongly. Mini expressions also may occur when strong emotions are felt but are being actively suppressed and all that leaks out is a fragment of the full expression. Dr. Ekman developed this training tool which increases peopleÂ’s ability to spot these tiny signals.
Thank you, I will have a look at that. I am very interested in his work and he is quite an important researcher for this topic.
Very interesting to see when you can capture them in slow-motion!
