In your face: The truth about lying

They are among the infamous liars of our generation.

Lance Armstrong, the iconic cycling champion and cancer crusader, spent more than a decade angrily denying he had used performance-enhancing drugs.

Edmonton’s Michael White tearfully asked the public to help him find his missing pregnant wife – the same woman he had, in fact, stabbed to death and dumped naked in a ditch.

Bernie Madoff deftly orchestrated a $65-billion Ponzi scheme, the largest investor fraud perpetrated by a single person in U.S. history.

But science is catching up and exposing the secrets etched in a liar’s face.

Forensic psychologist Stephen Porter, founding director of the University of British Columbia’s Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science and Law, says he and his colleagues can help authorities and doctors spot the telltale signs of deception.

In a newly published study, Porter and his colleagues report how their one-day, “deception detection” workshop is dramatically improving the ability of legal and mental-health professionals to discriminate between liars and truth-tellers, from a level of about pure chance, or no better than a coin toss, to 81 per cent accuracy.

The core of the workshop is formed from more than a decade’s worth of research into what Porter calls extremely high-stakes lies: lies of considerable consequence, to the deceiver and to the deceived, lies not just in the criminal context, but also in personal relationships, government, politics and business.

Liars, Porter says, tend to “leak” their true emotions from their faces. The corrugators, the so-called grief muscles in the middle of the forehead – the facial musculature least under our conscious control – don’t get activated as they would if someone were really in agony.

There’s also often the flash of a subtle and fleeting smirk when someone attempts to fake sadness.

Skilled liars will use fewer words and fewer sentences and, contrary to popular thinking, they have no trouble maintaining eye contact with the target of their deception. If anything, “they kind of burn holes through you,” Porter says.

Emerging research is proving what Darwin taught more than a century ago, Porter says. That is, when people are experiencing a powerful emotion such as fear, remorse, anger or excitement, it is virtually impossible to keep from communicating those emotions in their faces.

And the opposite is true: If you’re not feeling a particular emotion, it’s hard to fake it.

Get weekly health news

Receive the latest medical news and health information delivered to you every Sunday.

Sign up for weekly health newsletter Get Started

By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Penny Boudreau struggled to look genuinely distraught when she made a tearful public plea in 2008 for the safe return of her missing daughter, Karissa, whom she had strangled two days earlier. Except she couldn’t get the muscles associated with true sadness and distress working. Boudreau showed more surprise than anything, Porter says. “Raise your eyebrows as high as they can go. That’s what she looked like most of the time.”

At one point in the televised footage of that plea, she starts covering her face – a desperate measure “that we see in a lot of these individuals who are trying to communicate a false expression.”

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton “is one of the most convincing actors that I’ve come across,” says Porter, who uses in his workshops a video clip of Clinton denying his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky as one of the best documented examples, he says, of “effective deception.”

In the video, Clinton stares and glares at the audience, and famously waves his finger in the air while claiming, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”

Despite the aggression and confidence, almost challenging people to disagree with him, Porter can see flashes of fear in Clinton’s face, and even surprise. When Clinton refers to Lewinsky as “that woman,” it’s classic distancing language.

“High-stakes liars unconsciously, or perhaps somewhat consciously, don’t want any sort of connection with the person they’re lying about,” Porter says. “They sort of depersonalize the individual.”

More recently, Porter scanned the televised doping confessionals of cyclist Armstrong, as well as other interviews the disgraced cyclist gave over the years in which he denied cheating. Porter says he saw manifestations of fear and anger “that were inappropriate in the context.

“I suspect that, given the high stakes that were involved in maintaining those deceptions, to a trained, scientifically informed observer, there were probably a lot of clues he dropped along the way in his behaviours, his speech and his facial expressions,” Porter says.

Porter and co-author Leanne ten Brinke, whose PhD dissertation focused on the topic, reveal some of these cues of duplicity in another study published in December in the journal Law and Human Behavior.

Their paper, Cry me a River, described as the most comprehensive study of its kind to date, was based on exhaustive, frame-by-frame coding of televised videos of 78 “pleaders” – people publicly pleading for the safe return of a missing loved one.

In about half the videos, the pleader actually turned out to be the killer.

On average, people tell two to three lies a day, every day of their lives, Porter says. Daily life deception, on the “little white lies” scale, is necessary for good social relationships, he says.

“Imagine a world in which everyone told the truth – where everyone said what was on their minds. It would quickly spiral into chaos,” he says. “We have to be selective in what we tell people we’re thinking.”

Lies of consequence are another matter. Given that they are harder to tell than more trivial, mundane lies, the researchers hypothesized that serious lies should trigger more subtle yet detectable behavioural cues or “leakage.”

When they reviewed television footage of “pleaders” gathered from news agencies around the English-speaking world, the team found that deceptive pleaders showed less upper face sadness or distress than genuine pleaders.

The upper facial muscles are connected to a primitive part of the brain called the limbic system, Porter explains. When someone experiences true distress, those muscles instantly become active, and beyond voluntary control.

“The deceivers weren’t able to mimic that, because we assume most aren’t feeling genuine distress.” They try their best to fake distress. “But it comes out looking more like surprise in the upper face. They basically look like a deer in the headlights.”

The deceptive pleaders also showed subtle signs of happiness in their lower faces: They occasionally smirked when delivering the crucial “direct appeal” – the moment where the pleader asks the perpetrator to let the missing person go, or for the missing person to make contact.

They also show disgust in the lower face. Think of seeing or smelling rotting meat. “There is an immediate physiological response where your upper lip moves toward the nose, and there’s crinkling around the nose.”

The researchers saw flashes of that expression in many of the deceptive pleaders, but rarely at all among the genuinely distressed.

TEN WAYS TO SPOT A LIAR

-Liars tend to stare too long and too hard.

-Overly controlled, rigid body movements (few hand and arm movements in order to avoid looking nervous).

-Liars blink, on average, nearly twice as frequently as truth-tellers.

-Increased speech hesitation (more “ums,” “ahs” and “ers” in their stories).

-They use more tentative words such as “maybe,” “guess” or “perhaps” (avoiding commitment to the lie).

-Absence of distress or sadness in the upper face.

-More lower-face happiness (a smirk when attempting to appear sad, for example).

-Slower speech rate and longer pauses (allowing more time to construct a plausible story).

-More likely to raise their eyebrows.

-False smiles; muscles contract around the mouth only, no contraction of the muscles around the eyes.