…Presuming the innocent guilty, says Drizin, often stems from flawed interrogation training. Much of law enforcement personnel’s training convinces them that they are tantamount to human lie detectors (see more on this in this series’ next installment) with superior abilities to “read” guilt or innocence from a suspect’s emotional affect or body language. Deception research by social scientists like Bella DePaulo, however, show otherwise.

If detectives lock in on a suspect too early, cautions Itiel Dror of theUniversity College of London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, tunnel vision kicks in along with “escalation of commitment” to their conclusions. And through confirmation bias, the brain seeks facts that confirm existing beliefs while it discounts or disregards information that conflicts.

Meanwhile, many errors in an investigation are effectively buried before a case goes to trial, says Drizin. They’re simply invisible to the types and level of scrutiny a case typically receives as it works its way through the system….

Source: Pacific Standard, Sept. 6, 2012. By Sue Russell.
[Read the full article at PSMag.com]

We’ve all been lied to, and most of us have a high opinion of our ability to tell a lie from the truth. Yet research repeatedly shows that confidence to be misplaced and that judges, customs inspectors, and yes, detectives, make lousy lie detectors.

Those in law enforcement are trained to “read” body language, affect, facial expressions, mannerisms, and ways of speaking, and to believe that they can trust their gut. They learn that if a suspect averts their gaze, touches their nose, chews a fingernail, strokes the back of their head, slouches or fidgets, they are likely lying and thus, guilty.

Virtually all scientific research finds this mindset is counterproductive and even lowers the accuracy of judgments. People under stress—being wrongly accused certainly qualifies—can behave in ways impossible to distinguish from those who are lying. Yet the accused may be convicted in the court of public opinion—or worse—in large part because they don’t react to tragedy or the loss of a loved one as others want them to or expect….

Source: Pacific Standard, Sept. 13, 2012. By Sue Russell.
[Read the full article at PSMag.com]

By Courtney Humphries | The Boston Globe | February 21, 2012

What’s in a face? We generally see it as a window into our inner lives — so much so that it’s possible to read our emotions from our facial expressions. And in recent decades, we have become enchanted by the notion that with a little specialized knowledge, we can read these feelings very, very accurately. A program launched at Logan Airport last year has trained security personnel to converse with passengers while scanning their facial movements for suspicious emotions. Companies like Affectiva, a spinoff of MIT’s Media Lab, are developing ways to automatically judge a person’s mood in part by observing the movements of facial muscles. And the recent TV show “Lie To Me” was built on the premise that its main character could read hidden meanings in facial expressions and body language.

The premise that you need only the proper training to read emotion on our faces rests on a long history of research into the origins and function of facial expressions. Based on numerous studies, specialists have come to believe that these expressions of feeling are basic, automatic, and universal. Sadness, happiness, anger, and disgust are common to all humans, they have posited, and are expressed and recognized in a common way. Call it the emoticon theory of facial expression: Surely anyone can distinguish from 🙂 from (:.

But a number of psychologists are now arguing that this established view oversimplifies how people express and perceive emotions. They say that scientists have ignored equally compelling research over the years showing that context and culture affect how we interpret facial expressions, and that we don’t produce them in clearly readable ways. In sum, these researchers are suggesting that happy and sad expressions are not basic, evolutionary responses that take the same form all over the world, but cultural categories that we create from a much more complex emotional reservoir.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University, is one of this growing group of scientists calling for a more nuanced view of the relationship between face and feelings. She argues that while we may carry an archetype of each expression in our minds, in reality we make facial expressions less consistently, and our ability to recognize emotions is not as simple as just reading faces. “It’s not like there’s one signal for anger,” she says. “Yet we feel it and perceive it in others. How can that be?” She believes that recent research shows the answer depends, much more than we’ve come to believe, on context, culture, and the details of the situation. And in trying to force facial expressions into a series of archetypes, science may be missing the full picture: an emotional spectrum that isn’t easily parsed into emoticons. Continue reading »

…[Robert] Trivers calls deceit a “deep feature” of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling “bait” in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune systems. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.

She looks as innocuous as Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s famous detective.

But also like Miss Marple, Julia Hirschberg, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, may spell trouble for a lot of liars.

That’s because Dr. Hirschberg is teaching computers how to spot deception — programming them to parse people’s speech for patterns that gauge whether they are being honest.

For this sort of lie detection, there’s no need to strap anyone into a machine. The person’s speech provides all the cues — loudness, changes in pitch, pauses between words, ums and ahs, nervous laughs and dozens of other tiny signs that can suggest a lie.

Dr. Hirschberg is not the only researcher using algorithms to trawl our utterances for evidence of our inner lives. A small band of linguists, engineers and computer scientists, among others, are busy training computers to recognize hallmarks of what they call emotional speech — talk that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation.

Programs that succeed at spotting these submerged emotions may someday have many practical uses: software that suggests when chief executives at public conferences may be straying from the truth; programs at call centers that alert operators to irate customers on the line; or software at computerized matchmaking services that adds descriptives like “friendly” to usual ones like “single” and “female.”…

Source: New York Times, Dec. 3, 2011. By Anne Eisenberg.
[Read full article on NYTimes.com]