Keith Devens .com

The Naked Face

I read this a few days ago, but never blogged it. It's one of the most fascinating things I've read in a long time: gladwell.com: The Naked Face "Can you read people's thoughts just by looking at them?"

They sat beside him in a darkened room and showed him a series of videotapes of people who were either lying or telling the truth. He had to say who was doing what. One tape showed people talking about their views on the death penalty and on smoking in public. Another featured a series of nurses who were all talking about a nature film they were supposedly watching, even though some of them were actually watching grisly documentary footage about burn victims and amputees. It may sound as if the tests should have been easy, because we all think we can tell whether someone is lying. But these were not the obvious fibs of a child, or the prevarications of people whose habits and tendencies we know well. These were strangers who were motivated to deceive, and the task of spotting the liars turns out to be fantastically difficult. There is just too much information -- words, intonation, gestures, eyes, mouth -- and it is impossible to know how the various cues should be weighted, or how to put them all together, and in any case it's all happening so quickly that you can't even follow what you think you ought to follow. The tests have been given to policemen, customs officers, judges, trial lawyers, and psychotherapists, as well as to officers from the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the D.E.A., and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms -- people one would have thought would be good at spotting lies. On average, they score fifty per cent, which is to say that they would have done just as well if they hadn't watched the tapes at all and just guessed. But every now and again -- roughly one time in a thousand -- someone scores off the charts. ... Most of us aren't very good at spotting it. But a handful of people are virtuosos. What do they see that we miss?

There's also a PDF version [PDF] with some pictures.

Permalink | Comments? | id 2661

20:36 (utc-4)