From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Liar’s ‘Tell’

Is Paul Ekman stretching the truth? By Christopher Shea Paul Ekman has spent much of his long career studying emotions as expressed on the face. … Ekman is renowned for his ability to read faces for signs of what people are thinking and feeling. In his best seller Blink, Malcolm Gladwell writes that “much of our understanding of mind-reading” is owed to Ekman and his collaborators. He relates how Ekman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California at San Francisco, could tell by their faces alone when figures as varied as Bill Clinton and Kim Philby, the infamous British spy, were lying—Clinton in real time, Philby on historical video. Lie to Me, a television show featuring a human lie detector modeled on Ekman, ran from 2009 to 2011 on Fox. His work on lying is one reason the American Psychological Association deemed Ekman one of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th century. Ekman does not rely on the face alone to do what Gladwell calls mind reading, although that’s by far the best-known aspect of his work. His book Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Norton), first published in 1985 but updated through 2009, mentions more than 30 cues that can be helpful in detecting deceit, from “slips of the tongue” to “indirect speech” to “facial blanching.” He is much in demand as a consultant, and, at 80, satisfies most of that demand these days by offering online courses and training by surrogates through two companies, the Paul Ekman Group and Paul Ekman International. Business is brisk. On the public-policy front, Ekman’s work helped inspire an immense federal program in American airports called SPOT, for Screening of Passengers by Observational Techniques. Costing about $200-million annually—$900-million in all since 2007—the program, run by the Transportation Security Administration, deploys more than 3,000 officers to look for behavioral cues in the faces and body language of airline passengers. Those deemed suspicious are pulled aside and, if they display more signs of duplicity during an interview, are referred to law enforcement. But Ekman’s lie-detection work has recently taken some hard blows. He has long had academic critics (unmentioned in Blink) who say he has not proved that his behavior-based lie-detection techniques actually work. In November 2013, the Government Accountability Office took things up a notch by recommending that Congress cut the funding of the TSA program. The watchdog agency argued that neither scholarship in general nor specific analyses of SPOT offered any proof that malign intent could be divined by looking at body language or facial cues.

I’ve often wondered why the world is so impressed with the research of academic social scientists performed on undergrads being paid $5 or $10, when many of these topics, such as lying and cheating, are what some grown-up experts do for a living.

For example, the world went nuts a few years ago over Nobel Economics prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s collection of old Ripley’s Believe It or Not-style tricks, puzzles, and optical illusions. Everybody was amazed to discover from Kahneman that undergrads fall for a bunch of gags that were surefire ways to fool folks in vaudeville days. Why? Because when Dr. Kahneman tells a story contrived to pull the rug out from under psych majors, it is Science.

Similarly, when reading about Ekman’s research on lying and the criticism of him by other social scientists, it strikes me that few of the people paid to have an opinion on the subject come across as experts in deceit. If any of them are experts at lying (there are hints in the article that Ekman is a much better BS artist than his academic critics), they’d probably take over the earnest world of their social science subspecialty like the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind (hmmhhmm, kind of like how Ekman is king of lie detection in academia).

In contrast, consider a huge industry where everybody competes to be the best liar and to be resistant to the world-class liars around them: entertainment.

Actors are paid to lie, and some of them are much, much better at it than others. On the other side of the camera or footlights are professionals, such as casting directors, directors, and producers, who earn their living in part by sitting through auditions and not hiring actors who aren’t competent liars in particular roles. In the middle are acting coaches who know a lot of dos and don’ts about how to be a better liar.

Indeed, the entertainment industry is a Darwinian battlezone of competing illusionists and illusion-detectors. And that’s just the agents. Who do you think knows more about how to lie persuasively and how to detect persuasive liars: Professor Ekman or Ari Emanuel?

Take a look at a successful U.S. government operation at lying: the plot to get six diplomats out of Iran during the Hostage Crisis, as recounted in Argo (with much plausible lying added). The feds brought in the Oscar-winning makeup artist from Planet of the Apes and an old Hollywood producer to gin up some nonsense using an authentic bad Star Wars-knockoff script that the Iranians would fall for. It worked.

And yet none of the real pros seem to have been consulted post-9/11 because what they do isn’t Science, while having undergrads fill in surveys is Science.