[humanser] Body Language - Myth or Real?

[JD Townsend]

New York Times Science Desk Section 2014 03 25

FINDINGS.  Their Pants Aren't on Fire.  By JOHN TIERNEY.  Like
the rest of us, airport security screeners like to think they can
read body language.  The Transportation Security Administration
has spent some $1 billion training thousands of 'behavior
detection officers' to look for facial expressions and other
nonverbal clues that would identify terrorists.
But critics say there's no evidence that these efforts have
stopped a single terrorist or accomplished much beyond
inconveniencing tens of thousands of passengers a year.  The
T.S.A.  seems to have fallen for a classic form of
self-deception: the belief that you can read liars' minds by
watching their bodies..
Most people think liars give themselves away by averting their
eyes or making nervous gestures, and many law-enforcement
officers have been trained to look for specific tics, like gazing
upward in a certain manner.  But in scientific experiments,
people do a lousy job of spotting liars.  Law-enforcement
officers and other presumed experts are not consistently better
at it than ordinary people even though they're more confident in
their abilities.
'There's an illusion of insight that comes from looking at a
person's body,' says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral
science at the University of Chicago.  'Body language speaks to
us, but only in whispers.
The T.S.A.  program was reviewed last year by the federal
government's Government Accountability Office, which recommended
cutting funds for it because there was no proof of its
effectiveness.  That recommendation was based on the meager
results of the program as well as a survey of the scientific
literature by the psychologists Charles F.  Bond Jr.  and Bella
M.  DePaulo, who analyzed more than 200 studies.
In those studies, people correctly identified liars only 47
percent of the time, less than chance.  Their accuracy rate was
higher, 61 percent, when it came to spotting truth tellers, but
that still left their overall average, 54 percent, only slightly
better than chance.  Their accuracy was even lower in experiments
when they couldn't hear what was being said, and had to make a
judgment based solely on watching the person's body language.
'The common-sense notion that liars betray themselves through
body language appears to be little more than a cultural fiction,'
says Maria Hartwig, a psychologist at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice in New York City.  Researchers have found that
the best clues to deceit are verbal -- liars tend to be less
forthcoming and tell less compelling stories -- but even these
differences are usually too subtle to be discerned reliably.


JD Townsend LCSW
Helping the light dependent to see.
Daytona Beach, Earth, Sol System