The Wizards Project was a research project at the
University of California, San Francisco
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It ...
led by
Paul Ekman
Paul Ekman (born February 15, 1934) is an American psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco who is a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He was ranked 59th out of ...
and
Maureen O'Sullivan
Maureen O'Sullivan (17 May 1911 – 23 June 1998) was an Irish-American actress, who played Jane in the ''Tarzan'' series of films during the era of Johnny Weissmuller. She performed with such actors as Laurence Olivier, Greta Garbo, William ...
that studied the ability of people to
detect lies. The experts identified in their study were called "Truth Wizards". O'Sullivan spent more than 20 years studying the science of lying and deceit.
The project was originally named the Diogenes Project, after
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes ( ; grc, Διογένης, Diogénēs ), also known as Diogenes the Cynic (, ) or Diogenes of Sinope, was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynicism (philosophy). He was born in Sinope, an Ionian colony on the Black Sea ...
, the Greek philosopher who would look into people's faces using a lamp, claiming to be looking for an honest man.
Synopsis
The project defined a "Truth Wizard" as a person identified who can identify deception with accuracy of at least 80%, whereas the average person rates around 50%. No Truth Wizard was 100% accurate. "Wizard" is used to mean "a person of amazing skill or accomplishment."
O'Sullivan and Ekman
identified only 50 people as Truth Wizards after testing 20,000 (~0.25%) from all walks of life, including the Secret Service, FBI, sheriffs, police, attorneys, arbitrators, psychologists, students, and many others. Surprisingly, while psychiatrists and law enforcement personnel showed no more aptitude than college freshmen, Secret Service agents were the most skilled.
O'Sullivan remarked, "Our wizards are extraordinarily attuned to detecting the nuances of facial expressions, body language and ways of talking and thinking. Some of them can observe a videotape for a few seconds and amazingly they can describe eight details about the person on the tape."
Scientists are currently studying Truth Wizards to identify new ways to spot a liar.
Truth Wizards use a variety of clues to spot deception and do not depend on any one "clue" to identify a liar. Truth wizards have a natural knack for spotting
microexpression
A microexpression is a facial expression that only lasts for a short moment. It is the innate result of a voluntary and an involuntary emotional response occurring simultaneously and conflicting with one another, and occurs when the amygdala respon ...
s. They also home in on inconsistencies in emotion, body language, and the spoken word with amazing skill.
Ekman said on NPR: "We're still trying to find out how in the world did they learn this skill? Are they the sort of Mozarts of lie detection; they just had it?"
Ekman points out that the success rate of Truth Wizards is "without any specialized training,"
[http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/01/23/08 The Face Never Lies] and claims that anyone can be trained to detect microexpressions, one element used by Truth Wizards to spot deception in some case, and has released a training CD to do that.
Controversies
Psychologists Charles F. Bond and Ahmet Uysal of
Texas Christian University
Texas Christian University (TCU) is a private research university in Fort Worth, Texas. It was established in 1873 by brothers Addison and Randolph Clark as the Add-Ran Male & Female College. It is affiliated with the Christian Church (Discipl ...
criticized the methodology used by Ekman and O'Sullivan and suspected the performance of the reported Truth Wizards to be due to chance (a
type I error
In statistical hypothesis testing, a type I error is the mistaken rejection of an actually true null hypothesis (also known as a "false positive" finding or conclusion; example: "an innocent person is convicted"), while a type II error is the fa ...
), concluding that "convincing evidence of lie detection wizardry has never been presented." Gary D. Bond from
Winston Salem State University later replicated the experiment using a more rigorous protocol and found two people to be exceptionally fast and accurate at lie detection out of 112 law enforcement officers and 122 undergraduate students, a result consistent with Ekman and O'Sullivan's. Both experts at lie detection were female Native American
BIA correctional officers.
O'Sullivan responded to Bond and Uysal in "Unicorns or Tiger Woods: are lie detection experts myths or rarities? A response to on lie detection 'wizards' by Bond and Uysal".
[O'Sullivan, Maureen. (2007)]
"Unicorns or Tiger Woods: are lie detection experts myths or rarities? A response to on lie detection "wizards" by Bond and Uysal"
''Law and human behavior'' 31 Bond and Uysal had critiqued a chapter which discussed the initial stages for a research program under way. They commented on two different issues in particular. Firstly, the scores of any "Truth Wizard" may have been a coincidence and secondly, the procedures used for testing does not meet the standards of
classical psychometric class theory.
Ekman, Mark Frank and O'Sullivan also published "Reply scoring and reporting: A response to Bond (2008)".
In addition, the methods employed by the original researchers have also come under criticism, with suggestion that methodological techniques and particular results have not been published fully.
In popular culture
Ekman's work is the inspiration for the
Fox TV series ''
Lie to Me
''Lie to Me'' (stylized as ''Lie to me*'') is an American crime drama television series. It originally ran on the Fox network from January 21, 2009, to January 31, 2011. In the show, Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth) and his colleagues in The Lightma ...
'' (2009–2011). One of the show's main characters, Ria Torres, is a "natural", that is, a Truth Wizard.
References
{{reflist
External links
Lying and Deceit: The Wizards Project Scientists Pick Out Human Lie Detectors, nbcnews.com
Psychology experiments
Giftedness
Lie detection