Behavior: The Fine Art of Catching Liars

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Speech errors, such as slips of the tongue and odd pauses, often reveal lying, Ekman says, but body language provides the richest lode of information because liars usually do not bother to conceal it. When he showed volunteers films of several nursing students, some of whom had been told to lie, those volunteers who saw only soundless, neck-down films of the students were able to identify the liars and truth tellers about 65% of the time. A control group that studied only the faces and heard the words of the nurses got 50% of the answers correct, no better than chance.

A sure sign of deceit, Ekman says, is the presence of a "leakage emblem," the unconscious misuse of a common symbolic gesture, such as delivering an A- O.K. sign (thumb to forefinger, making a circle) from below the waist instead of above it, or producing a one-shoulder shrug. "A liar can show these leakage emblems again and again," Ekman writes, "and usually neither the liar nor the victim will notice them." Another finding: the use of gestures to illustrate speech, stabbing the air or making a circle in space, often falls off dramatically when a person is lying. (Lie spotters, however, should make an adjustment for speakers who seem tired or bored or rarely use gestures.)

Advanced students of the art of liar catching watch facial muscles closely because some muscle movements are almost impossible for most people to fake. For example, individuals who feel real grief will move the inner corners of their eyebrows upward. Only about 10% of the time, Ekman's experiments show, can people deliberately move this portion of the eyebrows. Another instructive facial slip: the so-called squelched expression, the fleeting appearance of a hidden emotion, followed by a rapid adjustment back to the desired look.

Ekman began studying the psychology and physiology of lying 18 years ago, chiefly to help identify patients who were lying to therapists. He does not feel that his findings are conclusive but thinks that someday it may be possible to isolate emotions and authenticate them by their own signs. "If you could pick up specific emotions, exact emotions," he says, "it would be much more accurate than lie detectors, which have only limited value the way ^ they are currently used." It would also present some painful problems. "What would life be like if we couldn't lie at all," he wonders, "if there were no way we could ever hide our feelings?" One clue to the possible --and eager --beneficiaries of such a world came when Ekman delivered a lecture in Leningrad. Two well-dressed Soviet men asked Ekman many intense questions about his work, then identified themselves as workers in "an electrical institute responsible for interrogation."