Say it Better

Is He Lying When He Won’t Look You in the Eye?

Remarkably people in 75 countries believe the top way you can spot a liar is that the person won’t look you in the eye. Contrary to common belief, that’s not true. You are more likely to be able to detect lying by looking at the whole face.  People avert their gaze in conversation for many reasons, most of them innocent, according to social psychologist expert Dr. Mark Frank.

Ignore some of the myths detecting lying such as “shifty eyes or sweaty brow” and look for the “cracking” of an expression to briefly display the underlying or true emotion that “leaks” onto the face.”

One of the most common is a micro-expression or “cracking.” That’s when someone is expressing sadness for something then, when pressed, displays a flash of the true, underlying emotions: anger and disgust.  That is how he really feels about the situation.

Both Paul Ekman (as described in Blink) and Stephen Porter have cited this behavior as an indication of deceit.  Unfortunately one must practice looking for those brief moments. 

Unlike Ekman and Porter we cannot video the moments in our life to review, frame-by-frame, yet we can be trained to better recognize those flashes of hot emotion someone is attempting to hide. “Ekman reckons your accuracy in detecting an attempt at deception ‘will increase from chance to 70% or better’".  

Yet, “the best liars tend to be the least troubled by their dissembling and produce the fewest outward clues," acknowledges Ekman.  There are times I’ve wished that I could have had a thermal-imaging or other detection device handy.

Ending on an up note regarding reading faces, your smile helps your mood.  It also uplifts those around you and the people with whom they come into contact. Emotion is contagious up to three degrees of separation.

Guess How Soon You Could Read Others

It didn’t take long for you to recognize basic behaviors and know what they meant for you. Even before you were a year old …

• You understood that individuals you saw over time would to act in certain ways.

• You recognized different emotions in those around you —fear, anger and happiness.

• You knew how to manipulate others as soon as you could move your body.

• When you saw people who were helpful and others who were hurtful, you understood the ones to avoid – even if you couldn’t.

Even before your first birthday, you knew all that according Paul Bloom, Yale psychology profession and author of Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human, a fascinating book.

After reading it you may be sufficiently intrigued to read Bloom’s next book, due out on my birthday, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like.

Within each of us “different selves are continually popping in and out of existence,” he writes. “They have different desires, and they fight for control—bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another”….

He suggests that this might explain why we act in contradictory ways and sometimes against our best interests.  It might explain “certain puzzles of everyday life” such as why:

•  Addictions and compulsions are so hard to shake off.

• We insist on spending so much of our lives in worlds­—like TV shows and novels and virtual-reality experiences—that don’t actually exist.” (For reducing stress, watching a high-definition TV was as worthless for patients as looking at a blank wall. Yet anxiety does goes down when they can see nature out a window.) 

Bloom’s book seems to complement Rita Carter's Multiplicity.  “We used to think that the hard part of the question ‘How can I be happy?’ was understanding happy. But, believes Bloom, it may have more to do with the definition of which "I” is top-of-mind at the time. 

Bloom wonders: “Can one self bind another self if the two want different things? 

Are you always better off when a Good Self wins?” For example Bloom seems conflicted about the attempts by some behavioral economists such as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler to set up rules in business and government that reinforce our smarter self's ability to take hold.  For example, those businesses that automatically put a portion of employees’ salaries into their retirement account, unless the employee opts out, have discovered that more people save more. In short, this practice supports the Good Self.

Now I am going for a walk to ponder my weaker and wiser selves. 

Can You Read Your Face? Fake a Smile? Detect a Lie?

We recognize emotions in our own faces more readily than in others.  If you can’t then something may be very wrong with your brain.  So reported neuroscientists this weekend at their conference here in San Francisco.

Researchers took photos of people who were asked to feign the universally-expressed emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, disgust and fear.  Weeks later they were asked to look at the mix of photos of themselves and others. They were more accurate in detecting the true emotion in their own face than in others. 

An odd conclusion one can draw from this is that it is easier to fool others when faking an expression than to fool yourself.  That makes sense since smiling when you are down is one proven way to lift yourself out of a funk and make others feel better around you. (Few notice your underlying feeling.) Also, it’s worth learning to read other’s facial expressions for many reasons  - from knowing how to best connect in the moment to experiencing empathy. 

Those universally-expressed emotions were discovered by Paul Ekman. He became an expert on reading faces by spending more than a year exploring his own, muscle by muscle, until he learned to read the fleeting micro-expressions described in Blink.  Now he’s the consultant on a new TV series, Lie to Me.

See the guilty knowledge technique to detecting lying. Then test your deception detection abilities.

For more on understanding behavior by facial expressions, consider reading ….

1. Paul Ekman’s newsletter

2. What Parts of a Face Most Influence First Impressions? 

3. Happy Face?

4. How to Improve Your LikeAbility

5. Spitting Mad: Getting Wired for War Online and on the Battlefield?

6. Become the Unforgettable "Face" of Your Organization

7. Morphing the Female Face Over 500 Years

8. Without Words, What Are You Telling the World?