THE FINE ART OF CATCHING LIARS

Psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman ran the film over and over again until he found the clue. Mary a housewife who had attempted suicide three times and had been confined to a mental institution, appeared chipper and confident on screen as she asked her doctor for a weekend pass. Her interview, secretly shot for reaserch purposes was so convincing that Mary got the pass, but she subsequently admitted that she had been lying and had wanted to get away for another suicide try. By slowing down the film, Ekman found that Mary;s face had sagged into despair, a telltale ‘micro expression’ that lastest only one twenty-fourth of second. Later he found other quick movements of deceit, a slight hand shrug, a brief lift of a shoulder.

In his book TELLING LIES, Dr. Ekman, a professor of psychology at the University of California at San Fransisco, says that catching liars is an art that anyone can learn: most unwittingly release a barrage of give away information when they lie. The key to judging sincerity is to pay close attention to the signals issuing from a talker’s face,body and voice. In one of Dr. Ekman’s experimentals, all 50 members of a group of volunteers learned to pick up revealing micro expressions as brief as one twenty-fourth of a second long. “Liars”, he says, “unusually do not monitor, control and disguise all their behavior”.

Dr. Ekman’s lesson come with one large caveat: even the best liar catchers cannot be right one hundred percent of the time. The ear

Tugger, the evasive rambler and the fellow who refuses to look you in the eye may not be lying, but they may just be fidgety thruth teller who is afraid of being accused of deceit. The person who rubs his nose every 30 second may be dissembling, or he may simply be displaying a lifelong nervous habit. Diplomats, natural performers and pathological liars are often impossible to read. Says Dr. Ekman; “We live in a probalilistic world. You’re only going to make an estimate”. (Nazi Dictator, Adolf Hilter, Dr. Ekman believes, was good at lying because of his ability to hide his emotions. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, duped by Hitler at Munich in 1938, once wrote,”Here was a man who could be relied upon when he has given his word”.)

Still, Ekman offers many useful gidelines for sorthing out every liars. Among his tips:
1. A prolonged smile or look of amazement that lingers is probably false. Almost all authentic facial expressions fade after four or five seconds. According to Dr. Ekman, there are 18 kinds of authentic smiles.
2. The body gestures and facial expressiona of liars are often out of sync. The person who bangs the table but then waits a split second to produce an angry face is probably faking.
3. Crooked, or asymmetrical, facial expressions are usually deceitful.
In seventy percent of people tested, the pitch of the voice rose slightly when they were upset, afraid or angry, a broad clue to the possibility that were lying.
Speech error, such as slips of tongue and odd pauses, often reveal lying, Dr. Ekman says, but body language provides the richest lode of information because liars usually do not bother to conceal it.

A sure sign of decei, Dr.Ekman says, is the presence of a’leakage-emblem” the unconscious misuse of common gesture, such as delivering a one shoulde shrug. A liar can show these leakage emblems again and again, and usually neither the liar nor the victim will notice them.

Dr. Ekman began studying the psychology and psychology of lying 18 years ago, chiefly to help identify patients who were lying to their therapists. He doesn’t feel that his finding are conclusive but thinks that someday it may be possible to isolate emotions and authenticate them by their own sign. “If you pick up specific emotions, exact emotions,
He says, “It would be much more accurate than a lie detector, which has only limited value the way it is currenly used”.

A foolproof way to detect lies could also present some painful problems. “What would life be like if we could not lie at all”, he wonders, “If there were no way we could ever hide our feelings?”. One sign of the possible-and eager-beneficiaries of such a world came when Dr. Ekman delivered a lecture in Leningrad. Two well-dressed soviet men asked Dr. Ekman many intense question about his work, then identified themselves as workers in “an electrical institute responsible for interrogation”.