10: Lies and Emotions
The author avers his interest in emotions is purely academic, but he has found that when presenting his work, the primary interest seems to be on lie detection. Its value in criminal and military interrogation is clear, but even among psychiatrists, the ability to tell when a patient is being truthful is critical.
The worst liars, of course, are those who cannot conceal their emotions: it is immediately evident even to a casual observe that there is something disjointed between the words they are saying and the emotional signs they are giving. A better class of liars attempts to conceal his emotion, and it takes a skilled eye to tell whether a given signal is feigned or genuine.
He mentions the use of film in psychiatric evaluation, and a particularly tragic case where a patient who was admitted for depression committed suicide after passing her exit interview. He spent many hours going frame by frame through a twelve-minute film, and it was here that he formed this theory of microexpressions: a look of anguish that lasted one-sixth of a second before the patient feigned cheerful indifference. Microexpressions vary from 1/25 to 1/5 of a second, so they can be very hard to detect in real time. He mentions that microexpressions are evident whether emotions are being consciously suppressed or unconsciously repressed.
While careful examination can detect microexpressions, there is still a problem of determining their context: we can tell a person is angry, but what are they angry about? Is it something in the conversation? Is it their attitude toward the other person? Or is it a stray thought that crossed their mind, wholly unrelated to the obvious context?
He lists four factors:
- The nature of the conversation - Whether the conversation is casual or formal, between people who know one another or strangers, and what each expects of the others' motives.
- The historical relationship - Whether the two people knew each other prior to the conversation and what is the nature of their relationship
- The speaker/listener role - Expressions are made when speaking and listening, and have different meanings
- Congruence - Whether the emotion expressed supports or contradicts what is being said.
The average person reads the macro expression but is often unobservant of microexpressions. Listening requires a great deal of effort - hearing and deciphering what is said, in the context of the conversation, then thinking about what you will say when it is your turn to speak. It requires training and effort to observe microexpressions, and even then the person engaged in conversation is often not able to give adequate attention to notice signs an observer might spot.
Not all signals of dishonesty are emotional. Some are cognitive: when there are factual contradictions in a person's account, it suggests that there may be deception. The more detailed and complex the story, the more likely there will be natural contradictions, as people add or subtract details with the telling. There may be flaws in memory or perception, and people are prone to confabulate - to adjust or invent details to make the story they are telling seem plausible and consistent.
Hesitation is also a non-emotional signal of dishonesty, as it suggests that a speaker is taking time to fabricate an account. While hesitation gives rise to suspicion, it is also a natural occurrence in truthful accounts, as a person my be struggling to remember details, or trying to decide how to phrase his statement.
Contradictions and hesitations are therefore "hot spots" rather than reliable signals of deceit - they are places to pay careful attention and consider whether there may be some alternative explanation before jumping to the conclusion that the other person is being dishonest. For that matter, so are microexpressions - because we are not immediately aware of the context and direction of the emotion, we note that it is incongruous.
Moreover, these sorts of inconsistencies are often signals of candor: in extemporaneous conversation we have to think about what we are hearing and saying. A person who does not hesitate at all, particularly when speaking at length or in detail, is not being candid. He has practiced his lines, and is more likely to be dishonest than a person who hesitates and contradicts himself.
In general, there are two parts to the lie: the first is concealing what you believe to be true, and the second is creating the cover story. These are cognitive elements that also have emotional elements: the term another researcher uses is "mask," which is the concealment of genuine feeling and the signaling of false feelings in support of the lie he is telling.
In general, masks have an opposite valence: a person feigns positive emotions to hide negative ones, such as smiling to conceal one's contempt with another person. However, this is not always true: anger is the most common mask used to conceal fear, though both are negative emotions.
Asymmetry of expression is a common symptom of masking - false emotions are generally less symmetrical than genuine ones, though the difference may be negligible and it can be difficult to detect without paying extremely close attention.
Another common symptom of masking is the absence of certain components of a genuine expression. In his analysis of false smiles, Duchenne looked to the eyes and the cheeks, and found that a reliable way to detect a false smile is in the absence of movement in those areas of the face. A person who puts on a false smile does so only with their mouth.
A third reliable symptom of feigned expression is immediacy. Expressions that appear very suddenly should arouse suspicion, as genuine expressions tend to appear more gradually or after a moment's delay, particularly during casual conversation that is not emotionally charged.
There are also three emotions that are often aroused by the very act of lying:
- Fear - The fear of being caught in a lie is the most common emotion experienced by loads. They are never quite certain whether the other party is going to accept their lie or call them out on it.
- Guilt - Guilt is expressed by a person who has just told a lie, as there is the sense of breaking the social contract when we lie to others. However, this is not apparent in "authorized" lies, such as told by policemen and interrogators, who feel no social obligation to be truthful in their roles. The pathological liar and the sociopath are, for the same reason, unlikely to feel guilt.
- Delight - When we feel a lie has been successful, there is often an expression of "duping delight" that arises from our own feelings of success and intellectual superiority to those who have accepted our lies.
He reiterates that there are no reliable signals of lying, only signals that suggest a person that might be lying - and when a person believes that he is suspected of lying, his expressions tend to become unnatural. That is, in order to convince the other person he is telling the truth when he expects to be doubted, an honest person may exaggerate his signals of honesty, which is then interpreted as dishonesty.
Another caution us that some people simply are not emotionally expressive. He estimates that about fifty percent of people do not transmit microexpressions at all.
Neither has he, in his extensive research, found a universal and reliable expression of dishonesty. The expressions made while lying are highly idiosyncratic, and there is no single universal. There does not exist a single sure-fire behavioral clue to deceit.
He also speaks disparagingly about the amateur lie-detectors, those who take fragments of knowledge and feel that they are experts in detecting deceit. They tend to be wrong more often than they are right - and for this reason it is critical for those whose success depends on extracting truth be trained and experienced.
There is the mention of bad training - training people to detect dishonesty by unreliable means also gives them a false sense of confidence that can undermine their success. He specifically mentions police interrogators in the United States - in one study these interrogators were less accurate in lie detection after training than they were beforehand.
And he cautions the reader about leaving this chapter with a sense of self-confidence - the coverage of the topic here has been far too superficial. If something you have read here causes you to suspect someone of being dishonest, your best resource is to attempt a more cognitive evaluation based on the facts. Ask them for more details about what they have said, or suggest that you are not sure of certain facts, and see if their response provides more obvious factual evidence.
To accuse another person of lying, or even to imply that you do not believe what they have said to be the truth, can be socially damaging. To voice suspicion of a person's honesty is the most hostile and offensive statements you can make, and it damages social relationships, so do not be casual about the topic.