Naturals at Spotting Lies
“Wizards” is the name we gave to the small number of people we identified who were able to consistently and accurately spot lies. In order to be able to identify who were wizards, we had first to create a test. In it, people saw ten people, half of whom were lying. We showed those video clips to tens of thousands of people including those who were members of all the American law enforcement and national security agencies as well as a few big city police departments. Only about 5% did better than chance in spotting the liars.
The first wizard I encountered was named J.J. Newberry, who, at the time, was responsible for providing training to officers in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). After reading about me in Time magazine he visited me to see if my knowledge could be converted into training for ATF agents. Before I agreed to talk with him I asked if he would take my test of the ability to spot lies. To my surprise, he achieved 90% accuracy, a feat no one before had ever accomplished. And, importantly, he knew what he was doing. He wasn’t using intuition but behavioral markers, most of them ones we had uncovered in our research. He didn’t know how he knew them, they just seemed obvious to him.
When we interviewed other wizards, our test identified and asked them about how they knew who was lying. They reported using the same behavioral markers we had identified through our research. They could not explain how they came up with these clues to deceit. They said it seemed obvious, not recognizing that it was not obvious to the overwhelming majority of people.
We offered to test members of any big city police department so they could know who among them were the wizards. None wanted to know! We would have found many more who weren’t wizards, and I suppose that would have been unwelcome news.
In a week, our training could turn most people into wizards, but few sought out that training, other than organizations whose activities were shady at best. We did give our training to all the members of the NYPD counter-terror section, but that was it. To this day, I am surprised there was so little interest in being trained; even though we did offer it without charge to big city police departments. I take a small bit of consolation in knowing I tried.
Now retired and 90, I have to consider this one of the roads I opened, but was not able to fully walk down. I decided not to make wizard training available online, afraid that at least some users would use the skills they acquired against the public’s interest.
The wizards research and findings remain unfinished, regrettably. I can only hope that someone reading what I have written about it, will recognize its promise and importance, and pick it up. Good luck!
In the meantime, you can access the micro expression online training. While there is no “Pinocchio’s nose” to deception detection, micro expressions are one of the most reliable potential clues to deceit.
