[humanser] FW: Body Language - Myth or Real?

[Merry Schoch]

Hello All,

This article was originally posted to the list from JD and I personally want
to thank him for this.  Although this article does not specifically address
our professions that have insulted us by professing we need to see our
clients' body language to be able to do our jobs proficiently, it does have
information that is useful!  

I will be sending this to our web master, Dennis Sumlin, to post on the
division's website for future use.  Thanks again JD for this valuable
article and the service you provide to our division!

Article below:

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


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