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- Researchers studying how good people
are at detecting falsehoods say most of us are miserable at spotting liars
- and those of us who are good have trouble picking out honest people,
the New York Times reports Tuesday.
-
- In previous studies, Dr. Paul Ekman,
a professor of psychology in the School of Medicine at the University of
California at San Francisco, and colleagues have found most people are
terrible at discerning liars, even when clues that a person is lying abound,
the Times reports.
-
- But one group that performs demonstrably
better are those whose job has trained them to be keen lie spotters, like
Secret Service agents, says Ekman.
-
- The difference, he reports in this month's
journal Psychological Science, is that unlike most folks, good lie detectors
don't rely on any single clue, like a lack of eye contact or throat clearing,
to tell them if someone is lying. Instead, nimble lie spotters notice and
interpret a multitude of verbal and nonverbal signals sent out by liars,
says the Times.
-
- In his latest study, Ekman tested federal
law enforcement officers recommended by their agencies for their keen lie
detector abilities. The officers were asked to discern whether volunteers
brought in to talk to them were in fact lying, the Times reports.
-
- To replicate the motivations and pressures
that liars experience in real life, volunteer liars in the study were paid
a $50 reward if they successfully convinced their law enforcement interviewer
that they were telling the truth.
-
- Ekman found that, despite the liars'
financial motivations, the interviewers still managed to pick them out
a majority of the time. The interviewers say the picked out the liars using
clues like shifts in vocal pitch, speech errors or pauses, which hinted
at hidden emotions of guilt, despair, distress and embarrassment.
-
- But those best at picking out liars had
trouble spotting the truth tellers, scoring not much better than chance,
reports Ekman.
-
- "That worries me," Ekman says,
"because in law enforcement, if you guessed that everybody was lying,
you'd be right 80 percent of the time. The real issue is how can I teach
people not to make mistakes on those truthful people, who are accused incorrectly
-- those are the critical ones you don't want to make a mistake on."
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