Before reading this post, we highly suggest that you read Intro to Deception – Deceptive Dimensions.

Effective deception is an indispensable professional skill.  Whatever career you’re pursuing, you will need to lie frequently and convincingly – first to get in, then to stay in, and finally, to rise to the top.  But the list of professions that actually teach lying are few.  Only lawyers, sales reps, PR managers, and politicians – in other words, society’s quintessential liars – receive truly rigorous training in the science of deception.  The average grunt, unfortunately, learns to to lie on the job, in fits and starts, and those who don’t quickly learn quickly disappear.

In Deceptive Dimensions, we introduced you to Paul Ekman’s theory of nonverbal deception.  In this post, we’ll examine another Ekman study, one of the first of its kind ever conducted.  Not only do the findings largely support the validity of the Ekman model, but it also demonstrates how necessary lying is, even in the most unlikely job fields.

The Study

ER nurses, as some of you may know all too well, are not just assistants for doctors and surgeons; they’re consummate liars.  No matter how devastating the trauma or how gruesome the scene, the nurse who greets the victims’ panicking friends and family at the hospital must convey reassurance.  If she fails, emotional breakdown results.  To keep chaos out of the waiting room, good nurses are quick to lie, and they lie well.

In 1974, Paul Ekman designed psychology’s first nonverbal deception experiment around this fact.  Let’s use his deceptive dimensions to break it down.

Deceivers: Nursing students.  They’re the subjects in this experiment, and to examine their nonverbal deception behavior, Ekman needs them to lie.  The nurses view two positive and two negative film clips, and while the final report doesn’t tell us what the positive videos displayed, the details of the negative videos are vivid: live amputations and scenes of third-degree burn victims receiving emergency treatment, exactly the kinds of scenes ER nurses see every day.  Ekman instructs the students to lie and describe the first of these gruesome videos as pleasant, the kind they would feel comfortable showing to small children.

Detector: Naive interviewer.  While the nurses are watching their four videos, an interviewer grills them.  She asks questions such as, “What kinds of feelings are you having right now?” and, “What kind of mood does the film create?.”  For good measure, Ekman instructs her to turn up the heat by asking, “Are you really telling the truth?” and, “Do you think I believe you?”

Stakes: Job success.  Ekman convinces the nurses from the very beginning that their success in nursing school and in their future careers depends upon their ability to deceive the interviewer.  Ekman explains that if they can convince her they’re seeing pleasant images when in fact they’re witnessing horrible pain, suffering, and bloodletting, then they’re ahead of the curve, already equipped to do the same when under pressure from prying patient families.  The Dean of the School of Nursing herself invites them to participate, cloaking the project in her official title, and tells them that prior research showed successful nursing candidates had already passed this ordeal.  Not one subject senses the experiment.  In their minds, it’s the real deal.

Salience: High, symmetrical.  As if the students aren’t under enough pressure, Ekman stacks the deck against them by telling the interviewer to be alert.  Some of these nurses will lie to you, he says; try to figure out who.  The nurses weren’t completely at a loss, though; they, too, are informed that the interviewer is trying to catch them.  But this information comes at a hefty cognitive price; now they must monitor their own internal feedback and interpret their interviewer’s external feedback – difficult tasks by themselves, much more so when done simultaneously.

Leakage:  Facial expressions and body language.  After the interviews are finished, Ekman sends secret recordings taken by hidden cameras to observers who then look for leakage.  Ekman edits the tapes to be mute and to display either the faces or the bodies of the nurses, never both.  (As in his prior article, he expects observers to find leakage more accurately in body language than in facial expressions, so separating the two regions is necessary; leaving them combined would confound the results.)  First, the observers rate one facial clip and one body clip for half the nurses in the experiment as deceptive or honest.  Then, the observers rate the remaining clips the same way, but only after seeing and analyzing two “baseline” clips for each nurse.

Results

In Task A, the observer’s were unable to accurately detect deception in either the face or the body (the group’s success as a whole was random, or nearly 50/50.)  Once they had become acquainted with the subjects’ baseline body language in Task B, though, their accuracy jumped for detecting leakage in this category, from 50/50 to 64/36.  Nonetheless, even after analyzing the subjects’ baseline facial expressions, they were still unable to detect facial deception; their collective success rate remained random.

Ekman admits that the results “only partially” support his hypothesis.  Why “partially?”  Because he originally argued that an untrained observer could pick a deceiver through his or her body language alone, excluding all other stimuli.  But though the results prove his hypothesis wrong, the most plausible explanation – that observers are terrible at reading body language, either because they just are or because they haven’t practiced it – actually supports his overall argument.  We spend so much time looking for lies in faces that the remaining 95.5% of a liar’s body can rob us blind.  Its classic misdirection, and it seems to work.

Cause for Relief, Cause for Concern

We’ve said before that you’re probably already a very good liar.  Lying is instinctual, reflexive, and after years of practice and repetition, your skills now are beyond the days of your youth.  So far, Ekman’s research teaches us that lying is easy (or should be, anyway) because 1. people can’t read your facial expressions; and 2. people always look at your face to find lies.  For small, mundane white-lies (technically speaking, these are called asymmetrical/low-salience lies), this is probably true.

But the results of this study should worry you if your lie is life-or-death.  The pressure under which Ekman placed these nurses was intense; his scenario forced them into a symmetrical/high-salience scenario intended to squeeze and wring as much deception leakage out of them as possible (5 nurses out of the original 22 cracked and confessed, by the way.)  Under observation, the tapes in which they were truthful were mistakenly mislabeled as dishonest half of the time, with no identifiable pattern.  This is terrible news.  If you screw up big time at work, your livelihood is at the mercy of a coin toss.  For big lies, you must lie better, plain and simple.

To Lie Is To Succeed

If you need any convincing that successful high-stakes lying is a skill everyone should learn and practice, consider the following:

“It was reported in the Method section that the subjects had been told that behavior in the honest-deceptive session was relevant to success in nursing…At the time, such claims were based largely on conjecture…The results now show that this is very likely the case…the supervisors’ ratings of the subject’s work with patients one year later was positively correlated with the subject’s being a successful facial deceiver…”

Now, we all know correlation does not imply causation.  But we can see where this is headed.

Sources

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1974). Detecting deception from the body or face. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29(3), 288-298.