Review – Lie To Me

Lie To Me? Well, I’m enjoying it. Right now I’m watching the second episode, where it begins with lie detectors and how they’re little better than holding a West African Egg.

In West Africa anyone suspected of a crime was made to hand a bird’s egg to another person. Anyone who broke the egg would be considered guilty, based on their nervousness.

In ancient China suspects were told to hold a handful of rice in their mouths during a prosecutor’s argument. The suspect was considered guilty if, by the end of that argument, the rice stayed dry — because salivation was believed to cease in times of anxiety.

And all bogus as a lie detector.

I quite like how they use archive footage of famous people engaged in the behaviors that they discuss – Richard Nixon stepping back and folding his arms equals ‘guilty!’ Whether or not they make this such an overt part of the show that it becomes more funny and / or irritating rather than enlightening, I guess I’ll figure out over time.

One thing I will say about it so far – I’m enjoying Dr Cal Lightman’s wry sense of humor. Eli Loker’s ‘radical honesty’ is a bit of a laugh as well. As for strong-minded, intellectual, talented and straight-forward female characters who can hold their own in the science-orientated company of ‘The Lightman Group’ – Dr Gillian Foster and Ria Torres do very well.

Torres: You’re saying I can’t learn the science?

Loker: I’m saying you didn’t have to… it must be irritating for a guy who has spent decades trying to see things you were born seeing.

But with most shows that the skeptically-minded watch, we’re keeping an eye on just how well-referenced and accurate the science claims are in it. The very first article I found comes from back in 2000 – which references a book that I really love – ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat‘ by Oliver Sacks.

From Science Blog – ‘Study shows language loss may improve ability to spot lying‘:

A study in this week’s issue of Nature finds an answer that may be surprising: people with aphasia — a loss in language ability resulting from a stroke or other type of brain damage — appear to have a significant advantage in spotting liars, particular when the untruths are given away by changes in facial expression.

… “As far back as the 1920s there are anecdotal reports of patients with aphasia being able to detect when people were lying,” [Nancy Etcoff, Ph.D.] says. “In the popular book ‘The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’, Dr. Oliver Saks describes a group of patients watching a politician on television and laughing at what they perceived to be his deceptive statements.”

To examine the truth of this observation, Etcoff and her colleagues used a series of videotapes prepared by co-authors Paul Ekman, PhD, of the University of California at San Francisco and Mark G. Frank, PhD, of Rutgers University. …For the current study, the videotapes were shown to four groups of participants. One group consisted of patients with significant aphasia as a result of damage to the left sides of their brains. The other groups were patients with right-brain damage and no language difficulty, healthy control subjects and a group of college students. The participants were informed that one of each interviews was untruthful and were asked to identify when the volunteers were lying and when they were telling the truth.

While previous research — including studies conducted by Ekman — has shown that people in general have only a 50/50 chance of detecting when someone is lying by their expression or tone of voice, the aphasia patients were able to detect lies cued by facial expression alone 73 percent of the time. The other study groups all had close to 50 percent accuracy in recognizing lies tied to facial expressions. The aphasia patients also did better than the other groups in detecting lies cued by both facial and vocal changes – 60 percent compared with about 45 percent. None of the groups did well in recognizing lies cued by changes in vocal pitch alone.

You might notice a particular name in that article – Dr Paul Ekman, PhD, of the University of California at San Francisco. He happens to be the science advisor for the show ‘Lie To Me’.

The notion of ‘observing vocal and verbal cues’ was something I came across once before, when looking at the work of Dr Richard Wiseman (I thought his PhD was on lying and went to go find it; I found one called ‘The assessment of psychic claimants : an application of schema theory to the evaluation of strong psychic claims’). To the right, I have a clipping from a Nature journal article called ‘The MegaLab Truth Test‘. That particular study has since found its way online for people to check for themselves – with a popular figure telling a truth and then telling a lie about a film they’re reviewing. As you can see from the clipping, back in 1995, it was suggested that perhaps that the visual cues were ‘more compelling’. This has since turned into yet another series of popular YouTube features by the Wiseman viral marketing machine.

Since that time, there’s been some more research (as demonstrated, on the site of Dr Ekman) on how we’re starting to learn more about how much the visual can trump the verbal. There’s a short interview in an upcoming ep of Science American, but he has given a few interviews elsewhere – The Calgary Herald:

Ekman, 74, was an early proponent of the controversial idea–first hypothesized by Charles Darwin–that human emotions and facial expressions are biologically determined and not a result of cultural upbringing, as anthropologist Margaret Mead believed. Ekman’s findings, now widely accepted by many psychologists, is that facial expressions such as anger, disgust, joy, sadness, fear and surprise are universal.

The Review of General Psychology named Ekman one of the “100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century” in 2002, but it’s a 21st-century TV show that occupies much of his waking time now. In addition to being the inspiration behind Lie to Me, Ekman is the series’ scientific consultant.

One of the interesting features of Dr Ekman’s site – he’s been getting into blogging too! “The Truth About Lie To Me“:

In the first few minutes of the first episode of Lie To Me the prisoner showed what we call an emblematic slip, the equivalent in gesture of a slip of the tongue. I use the term ‘emblem’ for any gesture that has a precise meaning known to all members of a cultural group – such as the A-OK emblem in the U.S. (Watch out; emblems are specific to each culture. Someone will slug you if make the A-OK emblem in Sicily where it refers to what is considered a perverse sexual practice!)

I’m going to continue to give this show a go. Maybe I’ll be surprised by what Lightman will reveal as he goes along – so far he isn’t as mean as House and I’m enjoying the very appealing visual elements of the references and settings.

But I’d say best of all? They don’t seem to be short-changing the science. Which makes for a nice trend.

Select Reference:

Wiseman, R. (1995). The MegaLab Truth Test, Nature, 373, 391.

Tagged as: Lie To Me, lies, lying, research, review, Richard Wiseman, Science, skeptic, Skepticism, TV series, TV show