The Fine Art of Catching Liars

By John Leo

Psychologist Paul Ekman ran the film over and over until he found the clue. Mary, a housewife who had attempted suicide three times and had been confined to a mental institution, appeared chipper and confident onscreen as she asked - her doctor for a weekend pass. Her interview, secretly shot for research purposes, was so convincing that Mary got the pass, but she subsequently admitted that she had been lying and had wanted to get away for another suicide try. By slowing down the film, Ekman found that Mary's face had sagged into despair, a telltale "microexpression" that lasted only one twenty- fourth of a second. Later he found other quick movements of deceit: part of a hand shrug, the brief lift of a shoulder.

In his new book Telling Lies (W.W. Norton; $17.95), Ekman, 51, a professor of psychology at the University of California at San Francisco, says that catching liars is an art that anyone can learn: most duplicitous people unwittingly release a barrage of giveaway information during their deceptions. The key to judging sincerity is in paying close attention to the signals issuing from a talker's face, body and voice. In one of Ekman's experiments, all 50 members of a group of volunteers learned to pick up revealing microexpressions as brief as one twenty-fourth of a second. "Liars," he says, "usually do not monitor, control and disguise all of their behavior." Ekman's lessons come with one large caveat: even the best liar catchers cannot be right 100% of the time. The ear tugger, the evasive rambler and the fellow who refuses to look you in the eye may be lying, but they may instead be fidgety truth tellers who are afraid of being accused of deceit. The person who rubs his nose every 30 seconds may be dissembling, or he may simply be displaying a lifelong nervous habit. Diplomats, natural performers and pathological liars are often impossible to read. Says Ekman: "We live in a probabilistic world. You're only going to make an estimate." (Nazi Dictator Adolf Hitler, Ekman believes, was good at lying because of his ability to hide his emotions. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, duped by Hitler at Munich in 1938, once wrote, "Here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.")

Still, Ekman offers many useful guidelines for sorting out everyday liars. Among his tips:

-- A prolonged smile or look of amazement that lingers is probably false. Almost all authentic facial expressions fade after four or five seconds. In Ekman's theory, there are 18 kinds of authentic smiles.

-- The body gestures and facial expressions of liars are often out of sync. The person who bangs the table but then waits a split second to produce an angry face is probably faking.

| -- Crooked, or asymmetrical, facial expressions are usually deceitful (see box).

-- In 70% of people tested, the pitch of the voice rose slightly when they were upset, afraid or angry, a broad clue to the possibility that they were lying.

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."

With reporting by Charles Pelton/San Francisco