Argumentative Paper
RESEARCH FOCUS 1: THE TRUTH ABOUT LYING
CONTEXT: Studies show that the average person lies several times a day. Some of those are biggies (“I’ve
always been faithful to you,”) but more often, they are little white lies (“Of course that shirt looks good on you!”) Some forms of deception aren’t exactly lies— like combovers or nodding when you’re not really listening. And then there are lies we tell ourselves for reasons that run the gamut, from healthy maintenance of self-esteem to serious delusions beyond our control. Recent research studies on lying show various outcomes, such as that children who lie are smarter, that lying varies based on cultural background, and that lying is not as easy to detect as we had once believed. To gain more insight into these topics, read the following framing articles and watch the TED Talk provided.
FRAMING ARTICLE 1: At Airports, a Misplaced Faith in Body Language
By JOHN TIERNEY THENEW YORK TIMESMARCH 23, 2014
Transportation Security Administration employees at work. The agency
employs thousands of officers who try to spot suspicious passengers.
Like the rest of us, airport security screeners like to think they can read body language. The Transportation Security Administration has spent some $1 billion training thousands of “behavior detection officers” to look for facial expressions and other nonverbal clues that would identify terrorists.
But critics say there’s no evidence that these efforts have stopped a single terrorist or accomplished much beyond inconveniencing tens of thousands of passengers a year. The T.S.A. seems to have fallen for a classic form of self-deception: the belief that you can read liars’ minds by watching their bodies.
Most people think liars give themselves away by averting their eyes or making nervous gestures, and many law-enforcement officers have been trained to look for specific tics, like gazing upward in a certain manner. But in scientific experiments, people do a lousy job of spotting liars. Law-enforcement officers and other presumed experts are not consistently better at it than ordinary people even though they’re more confident in their abilities.
“There’s an illusion of insight that comes from looking at a person’s body,” says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. “Body language speaks to us, but only in whispers.”
The T.S.A. program was reviewed last year by the federal government’s Government Accountability Office, which recommended cutting funds for it because there was no proof of its effectiveness. That recommendation was based on the meager results of the program as well as a survey of the scientific literature by the psychologists Charles F. Bond Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo, who analyzed more than 200 studies.
In those studies, people correctly identified liars only 47 percent of the time, less than chance. Their accuracy rate was higher, 61 percent, when it came to spotting truth tellers, but that still left their overall average, 54 percent, only slightly better than chance. Their accuracy was even lower in experiments when they couldn’t hear what was being said, and had to make a judgment based solely on watching the person’s body language.
“The common-sense notion that liars betray themselves through body language appears to be little more than a cultural fiction,” says Maria Hartwig, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Researchers have found that the best clues to deceit are verbal — liars tend to be less forthcoming and tell less compelling stories — but even these differences are usually too subtle to be discerned reliably.
One technique that has been taught to law-enforcement officers is to watch the upward eye movements of people as they talk. This is based on a theory from believers in “neuro-linguistic programming” that people tend to glance upward to their right when lying, and upward to the left when telling the truth.
But this theory didn’t hold up when it was tested by a team of British and North American psychologists. They found no pattern in the upward eye movements of liars and truth tellers, whether they were observed in the laboratory or during real-life news conferences. The researchers also found that people who were trained to look for these eye movements did not do any better than a control group at detecting liars.
She and some researchers argue that it may nonetheless be possible to detect certain kinds of “high stakes” lies by training experts to look for a constellation of body cues. Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia says the poor success rate in studies is caused partly by the limitations of laboratory experiments in which subjects are often asked to lie about things that don’t really matter to them. Liars may show more stress in a real-life situation when much depends on being believed.
In a study last year, psychologists at the University of British Columbia trained professionals in forensics to look for an array of facial expressions and other signs of stress or inconsistency in someone telling a story. Then these professionals looked at news footage of people pleading for the return of a missing relative. Some of the pleaders were sincere, but others were lying (as eventually revealed by evidence that they had already murdered the relative). The trained professionals were able to identify the liars with an 80 percent accuracy rate.
That’s an impressive record, but it’s only one experiment, and many researchers question how reliably these techniques can be applied in the real world. Other studies, including ones involving police interrogations, have found that people are not always better at detecting high-stakes lies than lesser ones. The fear of being charged with a crime can make an innocent person look suspiciously nervous, too.
The T.S.A.’s administrator, John S. Pistole, defended its behavior-detection program last year by saying it identified “high-risk passengers at a significantly higher rate than random screening.” The accountability office report challenged the methodology behind that assertion and questioned the cost-effectiveness of the program. It noted that fewer than 1 percent of the more than 30,000 passengers a year who are identified as suspicious end up being arrested, and that the offenses (like carrying drugs or undeclared currency) have not been linked to terrorist plots.
In experiments at the University of Chicago, Dr. Epley and his colleagues have found that people vastly overestimate how much mind reading they can do by looking at someone’s facial expressions.
“Reading people’s expressions can give you a little information, but you get so much more just by talking to them,” he says. “The mind comes through the mouth.
“When you’re lying or cheating, you know it and feel guilty, and it feels to you as if your emotions must be leaking out through your body language,” he says. “You have an illusion that your emotions are more transparent than they actually are, and so you assume others are more transparent than they actually are, too.”
( How good are you at spotting a liar? Take this interactive quiz to find out. )
FRAMING ARTICLE 2: Lying Sets Up a Liar's Brain to Lie More
By LAURA SANDERS SCIENCE NEWS FOR STUDENTS NOVEMBER 21, 2016
Activity in a brain region called the amygdala may explain how small lies escalate.When small fibs snowball into blizzards of deception, the brain becomes numb to lying. As people tell more and bigger untruths, certain brain areas respond less to the whoppers, scientists now show. Their data finding might help explain how small fibs can ultimately turn into a pattern of lying.
The findings "have big implications for how lying can develop," says Victoria Talwar. She is a developmental psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She studies how dishonest behavior develops in children. This research, she says, "starts to give us some idea about how lying escalates from small lies to bigger ones."
Neil Garrett is a neuroscientist in England at University College London. He and colleagues there and at Duke University in Durham, N.C., performed an experiment. Their teams showed 80 participants a crisp, big picture of a glass jar of pennies. The participants were told to estimate how much money was in the jar. Then they had to share that estimate with an unseen partner. That partner, they were told, saw a smaller picture of the same jar. That meant the partner would have to rely on the participant to get a good estimate.
Each participant was serving as a "well-informed financial adviser tasked with advising a client who is less informed about what investments to make," Garrett noted. He offered the explanation at an October 20 news briefing.
The participants didn't have to tell their partners the truth. And the researchers gave people varying incentives to lie. In some cases, for instance, overestimating how much money was in the jar resulted in the participant getting a bigger cut of the money. That gave the estimators an incentive to stretch the truth.
As the experiment wore on, the fibs started flying. People lied the most when the lie would benefit both themselves and their unseen partner. But these "financial advisers" also told self-serving lies even when it would hurt their partner.
Twenty-five participants also underwent scans of their brains while they told lies. The researchers used a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It estimates brain activity based on changing rates of blood flow in different parts of the brain as some task is performed. When someone had lied before, brain activity lessened in certain areas of the brain. This was most notable in the amygdala, a pair of small structures that sit deep within each person's brain and are tightly linked to emotions.
A drop in the amygdala's activity even seemed to predict whether someone would lie on the next trial. The findings suggest that the reduced brain activity actually influences the decision to lie.
The study design gets around a problem that can compromise other lying experiments, says Bernd Weber. He is a neuroscientist at the University of Bonn in Germany. Many experiments are based on lies that people have been instructed to say, he notes. That situation, he notes, "hardly resembles real-world behavior." In the new study, the participants were self-motivated. They chose to play loose with the truth.
But there weren't any real costs to a liar for a fib. The participants did not have to fear being caught. If they had been afraid, that might have altered activity in their amygdalas, Weber says. Further tests are needed to hunt for any effects of such fear.
There are plenty of examples from the worlds of finance and politics in which small lies spiraled into much bigger deceits, Tali Sharot noted in the news briefing. This neuroscientist at UCL was a coauthor of the new study. "There are many reasons why this might happen, societal reasons," she said. "But we suspected that there might be a basic biological principle of how our brain works that contributes to this phenomenon."
The principle she had in mind is called emotional adaptation. This is the same phenomenon that explains why the scent of strong perfume becomes less noticeable over time. The first time people cheat on their taxes, they probably feel quite bad about it, Sharot says. That remorse is good, she says. It curbs dishonesty. "The next time you cheat, you have already adapted," she explains. Now there's less of an emotional doubt "to hold you back, so you might be lying more." In other words, the more someone lies, the easier it may get.