For those of you – like me – interested in the heady mix of lie-detection and body language, there was a great piece on BBC Radio 4′s All in the Mind last week.  Here’s the blurb. 

“Trying to spot when somebody is telling lies has probably preoccupied mankind since the earliest humans. Who’s eaten more than their fair share of seeds and berries; who’s scoffed the leftover termite ? For nearly a century we’ve had the polygraph, or traditional lie detector, with its wires and electrodes stuck to the skin – and more recently techniques like Voice Risk Analysis and brain scans purport to detect truth telling from fabrication. But a study at Portsmouth University suggests that in this controversial area, an old fashioned pencil and paper could make more sense at singling out those who are being economical with the truth. Claudia talks to Dr Samantha Mann about an experiment where a simple drawing separated the liars from the truth tellers.”

Listen to the interview here.

According to her staff profile at the University of Portsmouth website, Dr Samantha Mann’s academic interests include:

• Nonverbal cues to deception
• People’s perceptions of deceptive behaviour
• Professional lie detectors’ ability to detect deceit
• Enhancing interview situations in order to facilitate deception detection
• Speech related cues to deception (Reality Monitoring)

For other articles related to the work of Dr Mann, see:

Liars ‘too self aware to twitch’

Liars don’t blink: they keep still and concentrate hard

Drawing a picture is ‘lie detection technique’

Whole truth and nothing but the truth?

See also my own recent blog The Body Language of Honesty.

Image credit: jmendicute.

Readers of this blog will know my interest in lies and how they relate to body language in particular.  I’ve even delivered a workshop called Lies and Damned Lies: How to Become a Human Lie Detector.  I want to use this blog to flag up some general development and stories in this area.

“Researchers are testing how people judge honest behaviour because they are worried jurors could reach a verdict based on the way a defendant looks.”  In connection to this story, check out a link to The Honesty Lab, “the first ever international study to explore public concepts of honesty”.

Just to counterbalance the gender bias in the first story, read here how one in four British woman admit they would lie when it comes to trying to conceive without their partners consent.

Doctors are among the professionals that expect to hear lies from the public.  One doctor speculates that this is “because the NHS is free at the point of delivery [so] its worth is not fully appreciated”.  Interesting…

Priests, politicians and psychologists from Northern Ireland all discuss the pros, but mostly the cons, of lies in society.  It seems there are few of us in this country who tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

From a scientific rather than a social perspective, brains scans seem to provide a way forward in lie detection.  “Brain scans could be useful as lie detectors to show if a witness lies when identifying a suspect in a crime investigation, US researchers believe.”  Perhaps they are even reliable enough to detect criminals and those who lie under oath.

And what about politicians: can they be honest?  Can they give a straight answer to any question?  And could we take it if they did?  I’d be lying if I said I thought we could…

P.S. Related “curve ball” story: Toddlers who lie ‘will do better’ in later life!

I used a number of web resources during the day to test their growing skills.  Some of you asked me on your evaluation forms to give the links to these exercises.  The Spot the Fake Smile test can be found on the BBC website.  Simon Baron-Cohen’s Reading the Mind in the Eyes test crops up in a number of places, including here and here.

As well as NLP eye accessing cues, the other ‘systems’ we touched on were Interpersonal Deception Theory and Statement Analysis or Statement Veracity Analysis (essentially the same thing).

For further training in deception detection, I would suggest a visit to the site of Paul Ekman, or to another site that deals exclusively with his Micro Express Traning Tool (METT).  For further reading, try Albert Vrij (for something deep) or Peter Collett (for something a little more entertaining).  A summary of the all the slides I used for the event is available for downloading from the Box widget on the side.

My thanks to those who joined in the fun and challenged me during the teaching sessions.  Believe me when I say that I’ve never met a nicer bunch of people…