This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Congratulations. You have been hired for your first detective gig. Report immediately to the downtown Manhattan office of Scientific American magazine. There’s been a robbery of their archival issues. They think it was an inside job. You will be interviewing members of the staff on their recent activities and whereabouts. Upon arrival, report to the Editor in Chief. She will fill you in on what has happened.
You hop in a cab and head downtown. On the train you realize, you were so excited about your first assignment, you haven’t brought any equipment with you other than a notepad, pen and your smartphone. How will you be able to catch the thief? How will you be able to tell who is lying and who is telling the truth?
You will have to rely on your quick wit and keen eye to spot the thief. The interviews may be your only chance to solve the case quickly and impress everyone on your first job. Hopefully speaking with the suspects will give you a clue.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
You immediately google ‘eyes and lie detection’ while in the cab. Your search yields 1,240,000 results in 0.31 seconds. Wonderful. How will you sort through the information in time? Thank goodness for New York City traffic. You begin reading one of the first theories that popped up. It is on Neuro Linguistic Programming and eye movements and has been around since the 70’s. It states that if a right handed person looks up and to their right while answering questions, they are lying (recalling imagined or fabricated stories). While if they look up and to their left, they are telling the truth (recalling actual events that they saw happen). Great, you will use this to sift through those who are telling the truth from those who are trying to hide something.
As you arrive at SciAm, you are greeted by the Editor in Chief. She doesn’t add much to the story. The archives are gone. They were stored in a vault in the storage room. The vault showed no damage and there was no forced entry. That is why she is suspecting an inside job. She hands you a list of staff members to interview and suggests you get started right away. She has already placed the first person on the list in the conference room for questioning.
You open the conference room door, introduce yourself and take a seat next to him. He’s an editor and astrophysicist. The Editor in Chief says he had worked at the SciAm offices late one night covering a curious story about Mars. Hmmm. During your questioning he seems calm though he does keep looking up. He says he left the SciAm office that night around 1 am after covering the Mars Curiosity story and that he rode his bike back to his apartment. Peculiar. But still, he seems like a nice, straight-shooting, honest guy. Besides, how could he make off with several vintage issues of SciAm on his bicycle?
This NLP theory of looking up and lying begins to look a little far fetched so you search around for more on the topic and come across an experiment that just came out of the United Kingdom last month. The study debunks the NLP theory of eye movement and lying. You decide to read through their experiment. And ask the Editor in Chief to delay the next interviewee on the list a few minutes.
To test the NLP theory of eye movements and lying, Richard Wiseman et al. took a group of 32 college students who were all right handed. They took each student individually and instructed them to take the researcher’s cell phone, go into a particular office, put the phone into their pocket or bag and then come back. Upon returning, they were greeted by a different experimenter, who asked them what they just did inside the office. The second experimenter would not know whether each participant was taking their turn at the lie or truth portion of the study. Under the lie portion, participants were told by the first experimenter to fib to the second experimenter and say they went inside the office and placed the cell phone into a drawer. When asked what the contents were inside the drawer, participants had been told to lie convincingly and make up what might be in an everyday office desk drawer. They were also asked about the arrangement of items in the drawer. Students had never really opened any drawers, so they had to think up “plausible” objects that might have been in the drawer and to imagine how it might have been arranged. Their eye movements were recorded with a video camera focused on their face while they told their stories and answered questions and those videos were later analyzed by an independent party.
Each student also performed the truth part of the experiment where they actually did put the phone in the drawer and therefore could truthfully name objects they saw in the drawer and its layout. Their eye movements were also recorded. Of interesting note, the contents of the office desk drawer were rotated for each trial and items were randomly picked out of an inventory of everyday office objects that might actually be in one’s drawer (like a stapler, an apple, an umbrella.)
After all of the students had performed both the lie and the truth conditions, the audio tracks of each interview were removed from the video clips and independent raters evaluated the eye movements by watching the video without sound, rating how many times and for how long each person looked up and to the left and up and to the right. They had no idea who was lying and who was telling the truth since the audio was removed and labels were hidden. The results showed no significance between liars and truth tellers in regards to the amount of time they took to answer and their eye movements were not indicative of the proposed gaze behavior theories of NLP.
So, your hunch about the astrophysicist was right, he was telling the truth (even though his head was a bit in the clouds.) Neuro Linguistic Programming was wrong, noting who looks up and to the right and up and to the left can not and will not help you to identify the liar. Then what will?
The Editor in Chief brings in the next person. You greet her and she sits. She introduces herself and you ask her to tell you a bit about what she does here. She explains she is also an editor and writes mostly about paleontology, anthropology and animal behavior. Could her animal-like instincts have told her to defy society’s rules and take what isn’t hers? Possibly. She seems a bit nervous and you begin to realize she is blinking her eyes quite a lot. Might this be a sign of a lying? You excuse yourself from the interview and do a quick internet search on blinking and lying. You come across a study that demonstrated that those who are trying to hide their emotions do indeed have a elevated blink rate. You go back into the room and feel like you just may have found your thief. You find her rubbing her eyes. After asking her if she’s ok you look down at her photo on the employee directory list. She is wearing glasses in the photo but today she is not. “What happened to your glasses?” You ask. “Oh, I’m trying out some new contact lenses,” she explains, “but they’re just killing me.” Contacts? Hmpf. That could be why she is blinking so much and rubbing her eyes. You definitely can not conclude she’s a liar based on her blinking. After thanking her for her time, you decide to cross her off the list of suspects for now and she’s dismissed.
Feeling like you don’t want to be misled again, you decide to stop the interviews for a little while until you have adequate time to research and read up a little more on the eyes and lie detection. You get a cup of coffee from the break room and then resume your research.
You come across another interesting study. Some researchers have reasoned that increasing a person’s cognitive load while asking them questions can act as a sort of distractor, making certain “tells” or nervous behaviors indicative of lying much more apparent. They assume that lying takes a lot of cognitive work, to consistently maintain the made-up story, to read the face of the interrogator to see if they are buying it and to be conscious to control your emotions and body movements so as not to be viewed as suspicious.
One study conducted in 2010 demonstrated that the act of asking individuals to maintain constant eye contact during an interrogation increased the individual’s cognitive load and made signs of deceit more detectable. Vrij et al. conducted an truth/lie experiment with a somewhat similar setup to Wiseman. They took 80 college students and divided them into two conditions, the liars and the truth tellers. For those who were unknowingly assigned to the truth section the experimenters asked them to play Connect 4 with another student in a particular room. The second student was really an experimenter. Soon after they began, they were interrupted by someone who came in to wipe off a whiteboard. Then they were interrupted a second time by a different person, this person claimed to be looking for their wallet and when they found it in the room they said there was money missing from it and that both of the participants who had been playing Connect 4 in the room would have to be interrogated to find out if he/she had or had not taken money from the wallet.
The liars bypassed the staged event of playing Connect 4 or being interrupted. They just were instructed to go into the room, take the money out of the wallet, hide it somewhere on themselves and then they given a sheet to study on what they would say happened when they were interrogated for taking the money. In their made up story, they were playing Connect 4 just like the truth tellers and the “script” laid out the staged event as it actually had happened to those in the truth condition. Each person in the truth and lie condition were motivated to be convincing as they were told they would receive 10 pounds if the officer believed their story.
The truth tellers and liars were each interrogated in a separate room by a man dressed like a British police officer. The interrogation was videotaped and the video and audio were later evaluated by an independent rater who was blind to the premise of the study and who carefully watched and evaluated the video and audio from each interviewee for pauses, speech hesitation, speech errors, frequency of arm and hand movements, hand and finger movements, eye blinks, leg and foot movements and gaze aversion.
Some of the liars and some of the truth tellers were told to maintain direct eye contact with the police officer at all times and to not look away. Even though they were told this, it was near impossible for each person to continue looking at the officer constantly but the independent raters who judged the videos later were able to detect the cues of deceit I mentioned earlier easier when the liars had been told to maintain direct eye contact versus when they had not.
Think of it as a cognitive juggling act, the liars had to keep their story straight, give details, maintain an air of calm and constant eye contact all while controlling their possible “tells.” I can see why they may slip a little bit here and there with increased cognitive load (a lot to keep track of and control), you are giving them more and more things to keep up in the air. No wonder some blow their cover.
You decide to use this in your next interview. You tell the Editor in Chief to send the next person. As you reach for a handshake, you get a hug instead. Odd. You ask him questions on what he does here and he explains how he comes and goes often and splits his time between two states. You instruct him to keep looking you in the eye. He looks away as he speaks of how he has his own keys to the place and how he has a deep love for science. He tries his best to hold continuous eye contact but he inevitably looks away. He fidgets, he looks away again. He’s nervous.
You call in the Editor in Chief. “I have found your guy. It was him. He took from the archives.”
Shocked and stunned, the suspect breaks down and confesses everything. “I just wanted something to read for the long train rides home,” he cries.
“Tell it to the judge,” you remark. Though the Editor in Chief herself shows sympathy for the science thief and explains that as long as he brings back all of the vintage issues he took she will not press charges.
“Judging from the looks of him, I knew you wouldn’t. Seems like his only crime is reading science a little too much.”
“If you only knew", she says, “thanks for everything. Job well done.”
“Don’t thank me,” you say, “thank those who really search for truth. Thank the research scientists.”
Afternote: The story you have just heard is fake but the research studies are real. The names of employees at Scientific American magazine were not given to protect the innocent. The sole purpose of this story was to reveal to you the results of some recent studies on eye movements and lie detection. No vintage copies of Scientific American were harmed during the making of this story.*
*Just to be clear, no one has stolen vintage Scientific American magazines from the SciAm offices but SciAm has made it quite easy for you to sneak a peek at classic issues ‘From the Archives’ without running the risk of a criminal record. Simply download from Scientific American Digital and make a quick getaway.
Photo credits: stock xchng photos: The Great Detective (Thomas Romer); Secure (Frank Kohne); alert but aloof (sxc user); Meeting Room (Razvan Caliman); Juggler (Emiliano Spada); Author pic: (Erica Angiolillo/Gotcha by Erica).
References:
Bandler, Richard and John Grinder. Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming. Real People Pr, June 1979. Print. ISBN-10: 0911226192
Porter S, Ten Brinke, L. Reading between the lies: identifying concealed and falsified emotions in universal facial expressions. Psychol Sci. 2008 May; 19 (5): 508-14. PMID: 18466413
Vrij, Aldert, Mann, Samantha, Leal, Sharon and Fisher, R. ‘Look into my eyes’: can an instruction to maintain eye contact facilitate lie detection? Psychology, Crime and Law. 2010 May 16 (4). pp. 327-348. doi: 10.1080/10683160902740633
Wiseman R, Watt C, Ten Brinke L, Porter S, Couper SL, Rankin C. The eyes don’t have it: lie detection and neuro-linguistic programming. PLoS One. 2012; 7(7) e40259. Epub 2012 Jul 11. PMID: 22808128