Lies and the Lying Liars

Greenboy at Needlenose links to this San Jose Mercury News article about people who have a knack for lie detecting:

Technology hasn't yet produced a lie detection machine that's accurate enough to be used in court, but one Bay Area psychologist has found a few people who are human lie detectors -- they can spot a fib 80 to 90 percent of the time.

University of San Francisco Professor Maureen O'Sullivan and others have worked for years to dissect what makes these folks so hard to fool.

Of about 13,000 people she and her colleagues have tested over the past decade, only 31 have distinguished themselves as ``wizards'' of lie detection, O'Sullivan told reporters Thursday at an American Medical Association briefing in Washington, D.C.

By interviewing wizards, her team has gleaned some hot tips for how to smell a lie.

Sheer mental overload from the process of fabricating something, O'Sullivan said, can show up as hesitations in speech or slips of the tongue. Accomplished liars may try to compensate by talking faster, but this makes them more likely to become tongue-tied or use odd phrases -- nuances that wizards can often catch.

Lying stirs up emotions, she said. For most people, the emotion may be distress, but others delight in deceiving people. The clue to the deception is the mismatch between what the person says and what he seems to be feeling.

Among the biggest bluff giveaways are so-called microexpressions -- subconscious smirks and grimaces that leap on and off the face within fractions of a second.

Greenboy comments:

Wow, if that doesn't sum up Bush's performance on Debate 3 perfectly - smiling at inappropriate times (like when talking about people without healthcare, jobless or forgoing their flu shot), broken speech, numerous tongue slips, a personal record on Smirks-Per-Second! Of course the simpliest way to tell whether or not Bush is lying is to read his lips - if they are moving, he is lying!

Keeping track of all the lies...is hard work. Bush knows that.