Plus, there are lies and lies. Ekman defines a lie as having two essential characteristics: There must be a deliberate choice and intent to mislead and there must be no notification that this is what is occurring.
“An actor or a poker player isn’t a liar,” he says. “They’re supposed to be deceiving you, it’s part of the game. Likewise flattery. I focus on serious lies, where the consequences for the liar are grave if they’re found out and where the target would feel properly aggrieved if they knew.”
Although, distractingly, even some serious lies can be good. When Ekman was waiting for a biopsy report on a suspected cancer some years ago, he says by way of example: “I lied to my wife when she asked me why I was acting strangely. That was a ‘good’ lie. You have to put yourself in the position of the persons involved.”
Generally, though, the lies that interest Ekman — and Cal Lightman — are those in which “the threat of loss or punishment to the liar is severe: loss of job, loss of reputation, loss of spouse, loss of freedom.”
Fortunately, those are also the lies that are detectable, because those are the kind of lies that invariably produce clues in the liar’s demeanor.
But how reliable are Ekman’s methods? Microexpressions, he says, are only part of a whole set of possible deception indicators.
“There are also what we call subtle expressions — not brief, but very small, almost imperceptible. A very slight tightening of the lips, for example, is the most reliable sign of anger. You need to study a person’s whole demeanor: gesture, voice, posture, gaze, and also, of course, the words themselves.”
Just read microexpressions and subtle expressions correctly, however, and Ekman reckons your accuracy in detecting an attempt at deception “will increase from chance to 70 percent or better.”
By comparison, when it comes to spotting really serious lies — those that could, for example, affect national security — he says simply that he “does not believe we have solid evidence that anything else works better than chance.”
Is he lying? I couldn’t tell. But it makes for engrossing TV.
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