U.S. professor discovers 'truth wizards': study

[seemslikeadream]

Associated Press

...

Of 13,000 people tested for the ability to detect deception, "we found 31, who we call wizards, who are usually able to tell whether the person is lying, whether the lie is about an opinion, how someone is feeling or about a theft," she said.

...

"Basic emotions are hard to conceal completely," O'Sullivan said. People may be afraid of being caught or happy that they are putting something over on another person, so some inappropriate emotion may flicker across their face.

O'Sullivan calls these microexpressions - changes that last less than a second - and the people best at catching liars are able to notice them.

The thinking clues occur because it's harder to lie than tell the truth, she said. To lie, people have to make something up. This can lead to hesitations in speech, slips of the tongue, lack of detail in what they are saying.

A group known as "superliars" is aware of those problems, she added, but may overcompensate by talking too fast.

...

Look for shrugs: "is someone telling you something very positive and shrugs in the middle," she said. Watch body posture, hand gestures, eye flutters.

...

Some 20 per cent to 30 per cent reported some sort of childhood trauma, such as alcoholism in the family or a highly emotional mother, perhaps leading them to screen for emotional clues from childhood. A similar number didn't notice their ability until mid-life and then began working on it, she said.

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http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1097953191832_70?hub=Health

[Cerridwen]

1. Where can I sign up to be tested?

I'm only partly kidding.

It'd be interesting to know if I'm good at this anymore.

[Xipe Totec]

2. He is Lying

There is no such thing as a truth wizard. I have a sixth sense for spotting when people are untruthful and I could tell that he made up the whole report.

Trust me :eyes:

[fugue]

3. Garbage

All sorts of things can skew the results. Someone can be afraid that you won't believe them when they are telling the truth. Someone can be from another culture in which different body language is associated with earnestness. My sister, in her college sociology class, once read a study on why white males preferentially hirer other white males: they recognize the nonverbals used to indicate interest and excitement. White women and black people (both males and females) have different nonverbals for the same feelings, but white male interviewers fail to recognize them as such and get the impression that the interviewee doesn't really want the job.

I have Asperger's syndrome, and one of the chief diagnostic symptoms is "inappropriate affect"; that is, from a neurotypical point of view, our nonverbal signals (facial expression, tone of voice, body language) do not match the situation or what we are saying. I am constantly being accused of lying, by people who "can tell!" when I'm not. (Aspies seldom do. It's another part of the syndrome; some of us don't even get that it's possible to do.)

So I'm sorry, but plunk one of these "truth wizards" in Japan or the Middle East or my living room, and I guarantee they'll misread the person they speak to!

[cosmicaug]

4. No, there's probably good empirical data behind this.

fugue wrote:

All sorts of things can skew the results. Someone can be afraid that you won't believe them when they are telling the truth. Someone can be from another culture in which different body language is associated with earnestness. My sister, in her college sociology class, once read a study on why white males preferentially hirer other white males: they recognize the nonverbals used to indicate interest and excitement. White women and black people (both males and females) have different nonverbals for the same feelings, but white male interviewers fail to recognize them as such and get the impression that the interviewee doesn't really want the job.

Which is more or less irrelevant to the point of the article (which makes it a point to confirm just what you're getting at that "Anxiety by itself is not a sign of deception"). No, I think that you are wrong. The article never claimed these people are infallible (if it did, I'd agree with you 100%), only that some people seem to be much better at this than most. And the "microexpressions" he's talking about will generally differ from many of the sorts of things that people normally look for (usually incorrectly) to tell if someone is lying. If someone tells you he can tell you when somebody's lying he's probably deluded but that doesn't mean that people who might actually exhibit a very respectable level of development of this skill do not exist (it just means that people delude themselves with great ease).

For instance, it is "common knowledge" that someone won't look you in the eye if the are being deceitful. However, if someone talked to you I suspect that it is more likely than not that you would be perceived as being deceitful based on this rule of the thumb. Someone who really was trying to be deceitful, on the other hand, would be more likely than not to maintain steady gaze (because it is under conscious control and they also know that not looking at someone in the eye looks "shifty" so they might even overcompensate). Thus, people going by "common knowledge" alone would be easily deceived by the liars (and would probably unfairly dismiss one as yourself --or one as myself, for that matter).

What they're talking about are more fleeting discordant body language features. I can't remember better examples than what the article mentions but the book Bodily communication by Michael Argyle covers some of this in a chapter on deception. Richard Wiseman has apparently also looked a bit into this sort of thing but I haven't actually really read it.

fugue wrote:

I have Asperger's syndrome, and one of the chief diagnostic symptoms is "inappropriate affect"; that is, from a neurotypical point of view, our nonverbal signals (facial expression, tone of voice, body language) do not match the situation or what we are saying. I am constantly being accused of lying, by people who "can tell!" when I'm not. (Aspies seldom do. It's another part of the syndrome; some of us don't even get that it's possible to do.)

So I'm sorry, but plunk one of these "truth wizards" in Japan or the Middle East or my living room, and I guarantee they'll misread the person they speak to!

You may very well be somewhat correct. Certainly there are some incorrect cross cultural stereotypes and misperceptions which stem from different cultural body language conventions. However, you should also realize that a lot of body language is hard wired. That is, while in Japan you might find that there is a lot less direct eye contact that in the U.S.A. due to cultural differences, an angry face will mean the same there as it does in the U.S.A.. As to whether one of these "truth wizards" would fare well in those situations is hard to know. I suspect some would and some would not. This doesn't disprove the fact that they might, on average, do a lot better than the average person. And, on the flipside of this, I suspect you are probably much worse at this than the average person (so just as there are people who would be much better than average at sensing deception there are others who are much worse than average).

[fugue]

5. In which case I don't get the point . . .

Some people are better than others at everything. This would only be news (and would only warrant the "truth wizards" label) if they were almost never wrong.

Crosscultural differences are more significant than you think. Yes, a blatantly angry face is clear across cultures. A mildly angry face in Japan is often not clearly so to a Westerner. They'd have to do a crosscultural study before I'd buy that these people are really good at telling truth tellers in general. A crossneurological study would be interesting, too: I'd bet money they'd read me as lying when I'm not. Aspies are wired differently; that's what makes us Aspies.

Whether I am good at this or not is beside the point, which is why I didn't raise it. I only discussed the accuracy rate I have observed in others' trying to read nonverbals, which doesn't require me to be good at it at all: a person makes a statement about whether they believe someone is lying or not, and eventually there is hard evidence one way or the other regarding how accurate their belief was. My opinion, of nonverbals or anything else, has nothing to do with it.

[cosmicaug]

6. I wasn't very clear.

fugue wrote:

Some people are better than others at everything. This would only be news (and would only warrant the "truth wizards" label) if they were almost never wrong.

Yeah, I certainly didn't make things very clear. These people are apparently remarkably good at this. Do note the numbers involved here: 31 out of 13000 people perform at this level. That's about 2 out of a thousand (a big part of the reason why I made it a point to mention that if someone tells you that he can tell whether people are lying to him just by talking he's deluded --because most of the time this would be true). These people would not be particularly noticeable in everyday experience (I don't even know 1000 people much less routinely interact with that many people). These people wouldn't even affect the sorts of studies you mentioned because they would not even be likely to be represented in them (not that I think these studies have much relevance in the first place).

fugue wrote:

Crosscultural differences are more significant than you think. Yes, a blatantly angry face is clear across cultures. A mildly angry face in Japan is often not clearly so to a Westerner.

I guess such a display is discouraged there. The point is that many of these things are hard wired.

fugue wrote:

They'd have to do a cross-cultural study before I'd buy that these people are really good at telling truth tellers in general.

Why? Even if it were so, it would hardly be a fair and meaningful test. In general an individual lives within a given society (that's why the expression "culture shock" comes into play when you place an individual into a society different to the one to which he's acculturated). If I said Johnny is very intelligent you wouldn't say that you'd like to see how well he does if we drop him in the middle of Finland before you'll accept that he's very intelligent (I'm assuming Johnny doesn't speak Finnish).

fugue wrote:

A crossneurological study would be interesting, too: I'd bet money they'd read me as lying when I'm not. Aspies are wired differently; that's what makes us Aspies.

I doubt that the signals you give are the same signals they are talking about when they mention "microexpressions" (a lot of these are below the neck, if I remember correctly--which I may not be doing). I suspect the non-verbal cues that others pick up on when they interact with you are a lot more blatant than these "microexpressions". As to whether these "truth wizards" would pick up on this or ignore it in favor of more significant "microexpressions", it would be pure speculation until someone actually tries it (I'm guessing that some probably would and some probably wouldn't).

In any event and no offense intended, it doesn't matter how such a hypothetical "truth wizard" would read you because you are an outlier. Whether they can read you or not has little relevance to whether they can read most people (because most people are not like you --and I mean that in a non-trivial way).

fugue wrote:

Whether I am good at this or not is beside the point, which is why I didn't raise it. I only discussed the accuracy rate I have observed in others' trying to read nonverbals, which doesn't require me to be good at it at all: a person makes a statement about whether they believe someone is lying or not, and eventually there is hard evidence one way or the other regarding how accurate their belief was. My opinion, of nonverbals or anything else, has nothing to do with it.

I wasn't trying to get you into this, necessarily. I was just pointing out that as outliers do exist who are exceptionally bad at reading these sorts of signals, it is not surprising that outliers exist who are exceptionally good (the fact that something wouldn't be surprising if it were true, of course, doesn't mean that something is true). Of course, the underlying assumption here is that there are relevant non-verbal cues reliably produced most of the time in the first place which can be picked up (and there is evidence for this --whether everyone produces these signals is another question).

For whatever it's worth, I'm rather odd myself. I have said of myself that "I suspect it would not be very hard to find a shrink type who would not think an Asperger's like diagnosis for me terribly outlandish".