Forty years ago, psychologist Paul Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training when he was asked a question whose answer has kept him busy pretty much ever since. Suppose, the group wanted to know, you are working in a psychiatric hospital like this one, and a patient who has previously attempted suicide comes to you. “I’m feeling much better now,” the patient says. “Can I have a pass out for the weekend?”
You also know, of course, that psychiatric patients routinely make such claims, and that some, if they are granted temporary leave, will try to take their lives. But this particular patient swears he is telling the truth. He looks and sounds sincere. So here’s the question: Is there any way you can be sure that he is telling the truth?
It set Ekman to thinking. As part of his research, he had already recorded a series of 12-minute interviews with patients at the hospital. In a subsequent conversation, one of the patients told him that she had lied to him. So Ekman sat and looked at the film. Nothing. He slowed it down and looked again. Slowed it further.
And suddenly, there, across just two frames, he saw it: a vivid, intense expression of extreme anguish. It lasted less than a 15th of a second. But once he had spotted the first expression, he soon found three more examples in that same interview.
“And that,” says Ekman, “was the discovery of microexpressions: very fast, intense expressions of concealed emotion.”
Over the course of the next four decades, at the University of California’s department of psychiatry in San Francisco, Ekman has successfully demonstrated a proposition first suggested by Charles Darwin: that the ways in which we express anger, disgust, contempt, fear, surprise, happiness and sadness are both innate and universal.
The facial muscles triggered by those seven basic emotions are, he has shown, essentially the same, regardless of language and culture, from the US to Japan, Brazil to Papua New Guinea. What is more, expressions of emotion are involuntary; they are almost impossible to suppress or conceal. We can try, of course. But particularly when we are lying, “microexpressions” of powerfully felt emotions will invariably flit across our faces before we get a chance to stop them.
Fortunately for liars, as many as 99 percent of people will fail to spot these fleeting signals of inner torment. Of 15,000 people whom Ekman has tested, only 50 have been able to spot the microexpressions without training. He calls them “naturals.”
But given a bit of training, Ekman says, almost anyone can develop the skill. He should know: Since the middle of the 1980s and the first publication of his best-known book, Telling Lies, he has been called in by the FBI, the CIA, the US Transportation Security Administration, immigration authorities, anti-terrorist investigators and police forces around the world not just to help crack cases, but to teach them how to use the technique themselves. He has held workshops for defense and prosecution lawyers, health professionals, poker players and even jealous spouses, and created an online course. With the aid of a CD-Rom or an internet lesson, people can presumably learn to tell when someone is telling lies.
TV DRAMA
Sound like a good scenario for a TV drama? Of course it does. Lie to Me, a new series from Rupert Murdoch’s US Fox network, stars British actor Tim Roth as “Dr Cal Lightman, the world’s leading deception expert, a scientist who studies facial expressions and involuntary body language to discover not only if you are lying but why.”
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