This message comes from NPR, sponsor Progressive Insurance, where drivers who switch could save hundreds on car insurance. Get your quote at progressive.com today. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. I'm not a friend, so that's cool. Yeah, now I have two. But I recently found myself going down a TV rabbit hole. It's technically a reboot of a reality classic, The Mull. Welcome to Malaysia!
Where players are working together as a team to carry out a series of missions, to prize money in a pot that only one of them can win. So you chose the cash, right? I like the 10th one. Within their ranks is a Mull. Yes! Anyone could be the Mull. Someone hired by the producers to sabotage the team. Should the players trust me? No. So this is like the amazing race meets among us. Yeah, but it's not on a spaceship. This show is set in the real world.
That's cool. I'm Ari Shapiro and I'm going to be your guide for this incredible adventure. Shout out to our news round up buddy Ari. He hosted this season. It's our very Ari. I was so proud. And I had to ask him. Before hosting the show, did you consider yourself someone who is good at spotting a liar? Absolutely not and I still don't. I do not think I got any better at it in the course of the show. Tell me about that psychological unraveling for you.
Because people can be nervous for all kinds of reasons having nothing to do with the fact that they're lying. Yeah, I mean, I am a terrible liar. I just cannot do it. But would you say you're good at spotting a liar? I think after all these years, I'm actually better at it, but I'm still not good. You know, you are not alone. There's this thing called Truth Default Theory, developed by Tim Levine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
He suggests that in communication honesty is the default. And people tend to believe each other. Because humans are social. And everything in our lives wrap around us being able to communicate and convey information to one another. But if there is a reason for people to lie, they do. So there's a whole body of lie detection and deception research spanning multiple scientific fields. And when I told Ari this, he lit up at the thought and he gave you like an assignment.
I want a playbook. I want some scientists to tell me, what do I need to do to figure out who the liar is? Okay. Like, very nuts and bolts, checklist, follow these guidelines. Okay. I mean, I love his like faith in science for one. I like that he wants this playbook of spotting a liar. Yeah, but I also wondered does a lie detection playbook even exist?
So today on the show Emily goes down the mole hole of deception research to discover how lie detection has changed and determine if it's even possible to catch a liar in the act. You're listening to shortwave the science podcast from NPR. This message comes from Moo. At Moo, they help you create beautiful print, marketing materials and branded merchandise from luxurious business cards to the best customizable water bottles you've ever seen.
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This message comes from NPR, sponsor Shopify, the global commerce platform that helps you sell and show up exactly the way you want to customize your online store to your style. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash NPR. Okay, where do you want to start here? I want to start with the polygraph. The machine used for light detection. Yeah, and oddly, the early inspiration for it was a medical device to record vital signs. So, a patient's like poles or blood pressure.
I mean, that kind of makes sense, but I mean, that's not for interrogation at all. It's not an interrogation tool. No, no. That happened around 1921 at the Berkeley, California Police Department. A rookie cop and physiologist named John Larson got a hold of a psychology paper by William Molten-Marston. Okay, I think I know this guy. William Marston also created Wonder Woman, right? And her last so of truth. Yeah, he was a little obsessed with like, sussing out who was lying.
And he thought there was a link between vital signs and emotions. And that a machine the polygraph could prove that. Dr. William Marston demonstrates complicated device whereby he claims he can determine and compute comparative emotions of blond, grownettes and red hair. Now, Gina, the science to back up Marston's claims was scant. But at the time, it was convincing enough for the Berkeley Police Chief who saw an opportunity.
He wants to make the police themselves more law-biting, give them science instead of violence as a tool. And the lie detector fits into that program because he wanted to change the way interrogations took place. Yeah, this is Ken Alder. He is a historian at Northwestern University, wrote a book about the history of the polygraph. He says it's used as an interrogation device started in Berkeley. But it then spread to police departments around the country and into the commercial sector.
So by the 60s and the 70s. You know, millions of Americans just getting an ordinary job would have to take one. It was constantly in the news and in politics because people who were mistrusted or somehow, you know, doubted would actually end up, you know, offering to take polygraph tests to prove their innocence. And Gina, this runaway implementation was happening without really any scientific evidence to back up the machine's accuracy, especially in real interrogation scenarios.
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me though, right? Because I mean throughout history, polygraph data has not been admissible in like most US courts. That is true, but there is a catch. While its results may be not admissible in court, if in the process of lie detection, exam, you confess the crime, that confession is admissible in court. And so the police use it to basically entrap people. That's awful. Yeah, the polygraph is not a lie detector experts have told me it's more like an anxiety detector.
I would fail. Your anxiety would be palpable. Yeah. And ultimately, Ken told me, you know, the work falls on the examiner. There are professional polygraph communities with membership numbering in the hundreds. And they stand by the machine, but studies performed outside of the polygraph community have found high false positive rates. So the polygraph has many critics. Aldert, Vry, a professor of applied social psychology at the University of Portsmouth in England is one of those critics.
Because it's a very naive to think that an interview settings, the true tellers are completely calm because they're not very often in these interview settings. If you're interviewed for a long time about certain crime, the police believe your guilty, but you're not your innocent. Yeah, I mean, like regardless of whether you're guilty or you're innocent, I mean, just being around police could be nerve-wracking. Right. So critics are right, fully cautious about these machines.
Even as pop culture makes light of them, like vanity fairs posting videos of celebrities getting polygraph. Yeah, I mean, I've only seen the Pedro Pascal one and I laughed my butt off. Yeah, the Kiki Palm were one is pretty funny when she couldn't ID for a revised president Dick Cheney. I hate to say it. I hope I don't sound ridiculous. I don't know who this man is. I mean, he could be walking down the street. I wouldn't. I wouldn't know a thing. Sorry to this man.
Is she telling the truth about that? That's true. All right. But is the polygraph still being used for like, I don't know, job screens in the security sector? Yeah, for hiring law enforcement officers. But the method has largely fallen out of favor since the late 80s, a federal law and many states have banned employers from requiring lie detector tests with very limited exceptions. But that hasn't stopped the deception field from trying to develop new methods.
There are other lie detection technologies out there. Okay, like tell me the other kinds of ways we're trying to figure out if people are lying. Oh, it's every tech you can imagine. I mean, scientists have tried to measure lies with brainwaves, with FMRM machines, with AI. And for a while, the deception field was captivated by the idea of micro expressions that a lying person could be caught by a skilled analyst of the human face.
Yeah, I've heard of this, like being able to tell if somebody's lying if they're like blanking too much or they're not looking at you or their face is twitching. As like a really anxious kid in person, I read people's faces obsessively, trying to figure out if they're mad at me. And you probably have psychologists Paul Ekman to thank for that. I'm going to teach champion this idea for decades.
But Regina, I am here to tell you that like the polygraph, micro expressions, everything you mentioned about blank blinking, all that, it is also an unreliable form of lie detection. That sounds like a good film script. And in fact, it is a film script because there is no research showing that really works in that way. Here's Alder DeGun, the psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, who's been studying deception since the late 80s.
And he, along with the majority of deception researchers, reject the micro expressions model. And in a recent survey, polling 50 researchers, a good number of them, like over 80% of them, rejected another idea that a liar cannot look you in the eye. The popular stereotype that a liar cannot look you in the eye, this is one of the few things that experts really agree just does not hold any water. We've got about a century's worth of data to demonstrate that this is the case.
This is Timothy Luke, a psychologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. And he was the lead author on that survey. And like this is, you know, I know this goes against a lot of like what people think. But for me, it's not that surprising that like science doesn't really totally back like how to find a liar, right?
Like anxiety, gaze, a virgin, like your face moving a little bit. None of these things are like universal. So is there any hope for our, like is there a step, a step process for detecting a liar? Like what do the experts say? So it's an important question to ask and it really depends on who you ask. I can say that the field is changing and moving in a direction away from nonverbal lie detection to verbal lie detection. So paying more close attention to what people are saying. Right.
And then on the examiner side, it's changing from like passive interviewing where you're like in a monotone like tell me everything you remember to active interviewing, like asking follow-up questions and analyzing specific details. Yeah. What details are they analyzing? It totally depends on the researcher.
Albert in the UK, he believes that liars and truth tellers use different cognitive strategies. So he says that in like an extended conversation, liars will keep their stories simple and truth tellers are more forthcoming. Truth tellers are willing to tell at all. But initially it doesn't really work that way because truth tellers initially don't say that much.
So what you need to do, you need to ask questions and these questions, if you answer the good questions, what you will see the truth tellers, volunteer more information. Now Timothy Luke, over in Sweden, he agrees that a lack of detail is a promising cue. But he actually questions the idea that there's any surefire cues. Right. It's been a conversation in the field pretty much since 2003, there was this big meta analysis led by Bella DiPallo at the University of Virginia.
And Timothy has further argued in this paper called Lessons from Pinocchio that if there are cues, they may be over exaggerated. It's not going to be a very powerful indicator. It might be an indicator in a weak probabilistic sense. It might be detectable in a research context when you have recordings of people and you're able to carefully observe and carefully document that. But the real world has so many variables. And Timothy thinks the very best liars can trick an interrogator.
It also makes him really uncomfortable whenever law enforcement starts building policy around ideas that might not hold up to scientific scrutiny. If you have a policy where you are encouraging security officers or law enforcement to rely on potential cues to deception that might be weak, might be unreliable, and also might be highly subjective in their perception that is going to open the door for potentially a lot of really problematic discretion.
It opens the door for a lot of bias to creep into judgments. And that can be both completely innocent and by accident as well as potentially more nefarious. So maybe we shouldn't be messing around with things that are this unreliable. Timothy thinks and there's a lot of disagreement in the field. But he says the best method for detecting a liar, like the only technique he advocates law enforcement use is called strategic use of evidence.
It's an approach to interviewing where you as an interviewer ask questions in a way to get them to address the information that you have without revealing that you already have that information. That way you have a kind of untainted statement to check against the facts that you have.
So basically fact checking. Yes fact checking. I guess is the best lie detector of them all. Yeah, but we do every shortwave episode in Timothy Levine at the University of Alabama Birmingham agrees that it is the only true way. And anybody who's tried to fact check knows it's really really hard and it's real skill. But to the extent that you can triangulate with multiple sources and to the extent that the communication is about something factual.
A good journalist to fact checking will get you about as close as you can get. So that's the best we can do for Ari is fact checking Emily Clawng. Thank you so much for reporting. I now invalidated that it was right that I trust no one. I wish there wasn't some truth to that, but maybe. This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn and edited by a showrunner Rebecca Ramirez Tyler Jones checked the facts quacy Lee was the audio engineer.
Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barbara and I'm Emily Clawng. Thank you for listening to shortwave the science podcast from NPR. This message is brought to you by NPR sponsor Lisa in collaboration with West Elm. Discover the new natural hybrid mattress expertly crafted from natural latex and certified safe phones designed with your health and the planet in mind. Visit L E E S A dot com to learn more.
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