Telling lies

Hello everyone! Today is day 24 and I’d like to talk to you about the next chapter “Dangers and Precautions” that I’ve read and a little bit about The polygraph or lie detector as we’re used to calling it.

At first, the chapter about dangers and precautions is mostly about how liars fool lie catchers and how to avoid such unpleasant results. There are certain precautions that a lie catcher has to keep in mind.

• The first precaution involves making the process of interpreting behavioral signs of deceit more explicit.
• Another precaution is to understand better the nature of the mistakes that occur in detecting deceit.

Sure I give you only a brief description of the chapter’s information, in the book Paul Ekman explains it in more details.

What’s more interesting for me, it’s the two types of mistakes that are exactly opposite in cause and consequence. In disbelieving-the-truth the lie catcher mistakenly judges a truthful person to be lying. In believing-a-lie the lie catcher mistakenly judges a liar to be truthful.

Throughout the chapter the author constantly refers to these two basic types of mistakes that lie catchers make, giving us an opportunity to be aware of such oversight. Paul Ekman provides examples for better understanding the situations in which it might happen.

Later in the chapter he explains how each of the behavioral clues to deceit are vulnerable to these two kinds of mistakes, and what precautions can be taken to avoid them.

When I read the author’s statement it immediately caught my eye, because probably in my mind I had the same thought but here it was put in such a smooth way:

“…the absence of a sign of deceit is not evidence of truth.”

As I’ve been reading the book I started questioning all the signs because there is always a possibility that you may get person’s emotion wrong because as it’s obvious — people differ in expressive behavior, and if there are urgent situations when you do not have a chance to be mistaken…I started feeling this pressure and heavy weight on the shoulders of a lie catcher.

There is also an interesting concept “a false tell” — a trick that is shown explicitly and deliberately to confuse an opponent (for example in poker) to believe that he has caught the con man lying.

Othello’s error is a really exciting and minblowing concept for me that the author raises in this chapter! It’s based exactly on the story of Shakespeare and in particular the character’s behavior as it serves as the best example of a “disbelieving-the-truth” mistake. This error occurs when the lie catcher fails to consider that a truthful person who is under stress may appear to be lying.

I have called this error after Othello because the death scene in Shakespeare’s play is such an excellent and famous example of it. Othello has just accused Desdemona of lov- ing Cassio and tells her to confess since he is going to kill her for her treachery. Desdemona asks that Cassio be called to testify to her innocence. Othello tells her that he has already had Cassio murdered. Desdemona realizes she will not be able to prove her innocence and that Othello will kill her.

The thing is that Othello interprets her behavior, in this case fear, in a wrong way and by killing Cassio leaves her in a blind. “Othello’s error is also an example of how preconceptions can bias a lie catcher’s judgments.” — says the author. After reading this part of the chapter I felt so uplifted in terms of realization of how often such situations happen in our ordinary life. Now, you and I, keeping in mind this knowledge, can track our own or other’s distorted judgment and have a possibility to change the outcome.

All these thoughts directly lead us to the statement formulated by the author and I cannot but agree with him: “The lie catcher must make an effort to consider the possi- bility that a sign of an emotion is not a clue to deceit but a clue to how a truthful person feels about being suspected of lying.”

Moreover, what is so awesome about this book and the author’s approach to his research is that he provides tables in the appendix for us to check which emotion can produce each behavioral clue. I’m grateful to how Paul Ekman thoroughly thought about everything in this book!

Also, it’s really useful that he again summarizes main points in the conclusion of the chapter. Now looking at my notes in this book I again come to the conclusion that it may take me hours and quite a number of pages to list all the information that I found marvelous, so I guess I’ll stop at this point talking about dangers and precaution and get straight to the next chapter.

So, the previous chapter smoothly leads us to the next “The Polygraph as Lie Catcher” with this phrase: “Which is more accurate in detecting lies, the polygraph or behavioral clues to deceit?”

As you can understand, it tells us about the usage of polygraph and how it actually works. After the introduction the author divides this chapter into some sections explaining various situations and conditions of using polygraph.

The most common usage is seen amon private employers who use polygraph in preemployment screenings, to control internal crime and as a part of procedures used in recommending promotions.

After business the next most frequent use of polygraph tests as part of criminal investigations (that is the most interesting for me). However, to my surprise they use it not only on criminal suspects but also with witnesses and victims whose reports are doubted.

The next section is about how polygraph works, and here I must say that somehow everything in my life has a certain connection, because some time ago I watched an interview with the profialist who explained the work of polygraph, which turned out really simple. Basically it traces the ANS signals (activities) on the basic level of biology and that’s why its work cannot take more complicated cases into consideration, because for example if the person thinks he stole something and that was okay with his values, or killed someone and considers it not to be a crime for some personal reasons the lie detector will not mark it as a lie. That’s why the polygraph actually can be tricked.

Considering this point the polygraph examiner uses crucial questions to provoke the nervous system. The next parts come from this point and are called “The Control Questions Technique” and “The Guilty Knowledge Test”. You now may probably understand how policemen are intended to use provocative questions that only a guilty suspect may react to. (It’s so exciting to imagine how it works!)

Later, in this chapter Paul Ekman shows us the result on Polygraph’s Accuracy Studies that are divided into Field Studies, done directly with criminals, Analog Studies, researched and experiments on people who were asked to play different roles and Hybrid Studies, that include a combination of the best features of two previous studies. The author even provides the table with percentage statistics after listing the research findings.

The next two parts concern Polygraph Testing Job Applicants, testing police applicants and testing to catch spies, which is crucial in my opinion.

The same states Paul Ekman, after explaining a controversial outcome when innocents may be judged as liars, while they wanted a job and were actually just afraid of being misjudged. The same happens with police officers, however the test is different as they are acquainted with the polygraph. The author is amazed by the absence of research on this matter. He provides the percentage of liars who might have been successful with their lying and truthful people who were considered lying — this tendency is not studied thoroughly enough even if it’s crucial for the government and nation, considering the fact that police workers and spies deal with serious organizations.

How many of the 8 percent who tested as lying but denied it — 245 people, by my count — are actually liars, and how many are truthful people misjudged by the polygraph? Again, only an accuracy study could produce an answer.

This is it for now about the contest of the book. And now some new words I would like to share with you:

• foolproof — (of a plan or machine) so simple and easy to understand that it is unable to go wrong or be used wrongly
• astute — able to understand a situation quickly and see how to take advantage of it
• deviousness — the quality of being dishonest or tricking people, but often also being clever and successful
• to be prone to slips — likely to show a particular characteristic, usually a negative one, or to be affected by something bad, such as damage or an illness (in this case with slips)
• scrutiny — the careful and detailed examination of something in order to get information about it
• to allay — If you allay a strong emotion felt by someone, such as fear or worry, you cause them to feel it less or to feel calm again
• to lull (the liar into a false move) — to cause someone to feel calm
• vehement — expressing strong feelings, or shown by strong feelings or great energy or force
• morass — something that is extremely complicated and difficult to deal with and makes any progress almost impossible
• stipulate — to say exactly how something must be or must be done
• purportedly — in a way that is stated to be true, although this may not be the case
• surveillance — the careful watching of a person or place, especially by the police or army, because of a crime that has happened or is expected
• discrepancy — a difference between two things that should be the same
• coercive — using force to persuade people to do things that they are unwilling to do

Thank you for your attention!