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ลำดับตอนที่ #73 : The best and worst ways to spot a liar
Thomas
Ormerod’s team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At
airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their
history and travel plans. Ormerod had planted a handful of people arriving at
security with a false history, and a made-up future – and his team had to guess
who they were. In fact, just one in 1000 of the people they interviewed would
be deceiving them. Identifying the liar should have been about as easy as
finding a needle in a haystack.
So, what did they do? One option would be to focus on
body language or eye movements, right? It would have been a bad idea. Study
after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read
lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than
chance. According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people
managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people
might as well just flip a coin.
Ormerod’s team tried something different – and managed to
identify the fake passengers in the vast majority of cases. Their secret? To
throw away many of the accepted cues to deception and start anew with some
startlingly straightforward techniques
Over
the last few years, deception research has been plagued by disappointing results. Most previous
work had focused on reading a liar’s intentions via their body language or from
their face – blushing cheeks, a nervous laugh, darting eyes. The most famous example is Bill
Clinton touching his nose when he denied his affair with Monica Lewinsky –
taken at the time to be a sure sign he was lying. The idea, says Timothy Levine
at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was that the act of lying provokes
some strong emotions – nerves, guilt, perhaps even exhilaration at the challenge – that are
difficult to contain. Even if we think we have a poker face, we might still
give away tiny flickers of movement known as “micro-expressions”
that might give the game away, they claimed.
Yet the more psychologists looked, the more elusive any reliable cues
appeared to be. The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour. With
familiarity, you might be able to spot someone’s tics whenever they are telling the truth, but
others will probably act very differently; there is no universal dictionary of
body language. “There are no consistent signs that always arise alongside
deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of Sussex. “I giggle
nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some avoid it.”
Levine agrees: “The evidence is pretty clear that there aren’t any reliable
cues that distinguish truth and lies,” he says. And although you may hear that
our subconscious
can spot these signs even if they seem to escape our awareness, this too seems to have
been disproved.
Despite these damning results, our safety often still hinges on the existence of these mythical
cues. Consider the screening some passengers might face before a long-haul
flight – a process Ormerod was asked to investigate in the run up to the 2012
Olympics. Typically, he says, officers will use a “yes/no” questionnaire about
the flyer’s intentions, and they are trained to observe “suspicious signs”
(such as nervous body language) that might betray deception. “It doesn’t give a
chance to listen to what they say, and think about credibility, observe
behaviour change – they are the critical aspects of deception detection,” he
says. The existing protocols
are also prone to bias,
he says – officers were more likely to find suspicious signs in certain ethnic groups, for instance.
“The current method actually prevents deception detection,” he says.
Clearly, a new method is needed. But given some of the dismal results from the
lab, what should it be? Ormerod’s answer was disarmingly simple: shift the
focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying,
gently probing the
right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble.
Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University
of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should
increase your chances of uncovering deceit:
Use open questions. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they
become entrapped in their own web of deceit.
Employ the element of surprise. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load” – such as
by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for
them to maintain their façade.
Watch for small, verifiable details. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford,
ask them to tell you about their journey to work. If you do find a
contradiction, though, don’t give yourself away – it’s better to allow the
liar’s confidence to build as they rattle off more falsehoods, rather than correcting them.
Observe changes in confidence.Watch carefully to see how a potential liar’s style
changes when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a
conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like
they are losing control.
The aim is a casual conversation rather than an intense
interrogation. Under this gentle pressure, however, the liar will give
themselves away by contradicting their own story, or by becoming obviously evasive or erratic in their
responses. “The important thing is that there is no magic silver bullet; we are
taking the best things and putting them together for a cognitive approach,”
says Ormerod.
Ormerod openly admits his strategy might sound like
common sense. “A friend said that you are trying to patent the art of conversation,” he says.
But the results speak for themselves. The team prepared a handful of fake
passengers, with realistic tickets and travel documents. They were given a week
to prepare their story, and were then asked to line up with other, genuine
passengers at airports across Europe. Officers trained in Ormerod and Dando’s
interviewing technique were more than 20 times more likely to detect
these fake passengers than people using the suspicious signs, finding them 70%
of the time.
“It’s really impressive,” says Levine, who was not
involved in this study. He thinks it is particularly important that they
conducted the experiment in real airports. “It’s the most realistic study
around.”
The art of persuasion
Levine’s own experiments have proven similarly powerful.
Like Ormerod, he believes that clever interviews designed to reveal holes in a
liar’s story are far better than trying to identify tell-tale signs in body
language. He recently set up a trivia game, in which undergraduates played in
pairs for a cash prize of $5 for each correct answer they gave. Unknown to the
students, their partners were actors, and when the game master temporarily left
the room, the actor would suggest that they quickly peek at the answers to
cheat on the game. A handful of the students took him up on the offer.
Afterwards,
the students were all questioned by real federal agents about whether or not they had
cheated. Using tactical questions to probe their stories – without focusing on
body language or other cues – they
managed to find the cheaters with more than 90% accuracy; one expert was even correct 100% of the time,
across 33 interviews – a staggering
result that towers above the accuracy of body language analyses. Importantly, a
follow-up study found that even
novices managed to
achieve nearly 80% accuracy,
simply by using the right, open-ended questions that asked, for instance, how
their partner would tell the story.
Indeed,
often the investigators persuaded the cheaters to openly admit their misdeed. “The experts
were fabulously good at this,” says Levine. Their secret was a simple trick
known tomasters in the art of persuasion: they would open the conversation by asking the
students how honest they were. Simply getting them to say they told the truth primed them to be more candid later. “People
want to think of being honest, and this ties them into being cooperative,” says
Levine. “Even the people who weren’t honest had difficulty pretending to be
cooperative [after this], so for the most part you could see who was faking it.”
Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert
detectives – but given the folklore surrounding body language, it’s worth emphasising
just how powerful persuasion can be compared to the dubious science of body
language. Despite their successes, Ormerod and Levine are both keen that others
attempt to replicate
and expand on their findings, to make sure that they stand up in different
situations. “We should watch out for big sweeping claims,” says Levine.
Although the techniques will primarily help law
enforcement, the same principles might just help you hunt out the liars in your
own life. “I do it with kids all the time,” Ormerod says. The main thing to
remember is to keep an open mind and not to jump to early conclusions: just
because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does
not mean they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies.
There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a
little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the
truth will out.
Haystack (n.) a large,
tall pile of hay in a field
Plagued (v.)
to cause worry,
pain,
or difficulty to someone or
something over a period of time:
to annoy someone, especially by asking repeated questions
Dart (v.)
exhilaration (n.)
excitement and happiness
Elusive (adj.)
difficult to describe, find, achieve, or remember:
tic (n.)
a sudden and uncontrolled small movement, especially of the face, especially because of a nervous illness
subconscious (n.)
the part of your mind that notices and remembersinformation when you are not actively trying to do so, and influences your behaviour even though you do not realize it:
(adj.)
relating to this part of your mind:
damning (adj.)
A damning report, judgment, remark,
etc. that includes a lot of criticism or shows clearly that someone is wrong, guilty, or
has behaved very badly:
Hinge (n.)
a piece of metal that fastens the edge of a door,
window, lid,
etc. to something else and allows it to open or close:
prone (adj.)
likely to suffer from an illness or show a particular negativecharacteristic:
Prone (suffix)
likely to experience a particular problem more often
than is usual:
Bias (n.)
the action of supporting or opposing a particular person or thing in an unfair way, because of allowing personal opinions to influence your judgment:
ethnic (adj.)
relating to a particular race of people:
from a
different race, or interesting because characteristic of an ethnic group that is very different from those that are common in western culture:
deception (n.)
the act of hiding the truth, especially to get an advantage:
dismal (adj.)
very bad:
probing (adj.)
intended to get information:
Crumble (v.)
to break,
or cause something to break,
into smallpieces:
to become weaker in strength or influence:
Cognitive (adj.)
connected with thinking or conscious mental processes:
Façade (n.)
the front of a building, especially a large or attractivebuilding:
a false appearance that makes
someone or something seem more pleasant or better than they really are:
rattle (n.)
a sound similar to a series of quickly repeated knocks:
(v.)
to worry someone or make someone nervous:
verbose (adj.)
using or containing more words than
are necessary:
evasive (adj.)
answering questions in a way that is not direct or clear, especially because you do not want to give an honestanswer:
done to avoid something bad happening
erratic (Adj.)
moving or behaving in a way that is
not regular, certain, or expected:
patent(n.)
the official legal right to make or sell an invention for a particular number of years:
(v.)
to get the official legal right to make or sell an invention:
(adj.)
very obvious:
federal (adj.)
]relating to the central government, and not to the government of a region, of some countries such as the US
A federal system of government consists of a group of regions that are controlled by a central government.
staggering (adj.)
very shocking and surprising:
novices (n.)
a person who is not experienced in a job or situation:
a person who is training to be a monk or a nun
misdeed (n.)
an act that is criminal or bad:
primed (adj.)
(n.)
the period in your life when you are most active or successful:
(v.)
to tell someone something that will prepare them for a particular situation:
to cover the surface of wood with a special paint before the main paint is put on
to make a bomb or gun ready to explode or fire
candid (adj.)
honest and telling the truth, especially about something difficult or painful:
cooperative (adj.)
willing to help or do what people ask:
(n.)
a company that is owned and managed by the people who work in it:
replicate (v.)
to make or do something again in exactly the same way:
If organisms andgenetic or other structures replicate, they make exact copiesof themselves:
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