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from the just-check-if-they-are-horizontal dept.
PsychCentral has a decent summary of a recent software-based effort from University of Michigan to discover who's lying and who's not.
By carefully observing people telling lies during high-stakes court cases, researchers at the University of Michigan are developing unique lie-detecting software based on real-world data.
Their lie-detecting model considers both the person's words and gestures, and unlike a polygraph, it doesn't need to touch the speaker in order to work.
In experiments, the prototype was up to 75 percent accurate in identifying who was telling a lie (as defined by trial outcomes), compared with humans' scores of just above 50 percent. The tool might be helpful one day for security agents, juries, and even mental health professionals.
To develop the software, the researchers used machine-learning techniques to train it on a set of 120 video clips from media coverage of actual trials. Some of the clips they used were from the website of The Innocence Project, a national organization that works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.
[More after the break.]
Researchers found that the people who were lying had a number of distinctive tells. They moved their hands more, scowled or grimaced, said "um" more frequently, and attempted to create a sense of distance between themselves and their alleged crime or civil misbehavior by using words like "he" or "she" rather than "I" or "we." Even more interesting, liars tended to make a greater effort at sounding sure of themselves — not only would they feign confidence, but they would also look the questioner in the eye, perhaps attempting to establish believability.
"In laboratory experiments, it's difficult to create a setting that motivates people to truly lie. The stakes are not high enough,...We can offer a reward if people can lie well — pay them to convince another person that something false is true. But in the real world there is true motivation to deceive. People are poor lie detectors. This isn't the kind of task we're naturally good at. There are clues that humans give naturally when they are being deceptive, but we're not paying close enough attention to pick them up."
"It was 75 percent accurate in identifying who was lying. That's much better than humans, who did just better than a coin-flip."
"The system might one day be a helpful tool for security agents, juries and even mental health professionals."
I have to imagine this is a child's game compared to what Three Letter Agencies have developed.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Sunday December 13 2015, @10:46PM
Everybody is lying a lot all the time. It is ingrained in our being and it has served us well. It also has drawbacks, but detecting every lie would be detrimental to our being and society.
Imagine a society that never lies. Ever seen the film "The invention of lying"?
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Monday December 14 2015, @12:45AM
Imagine a society that never lies.
some people are too weak emotionally to deal with the truth. their reaction is to take it as a personal attack and demand an apology. bad parents have an especially hard time with this because they usually have bad parents of their own which is what defined theri bad parenting to start with, so they feel that not only is it an attack on them but their concept of family.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @01:04AM
> Everybody is lying a lot all the time.
Not only that, but there are all kinds of different lies.
Broadly, there are lies that are for the benefit of the liar (I didn't steal that money) and lies for the benefit of person being lied to (you don't look fat in those pants). And there are lies where there are a mix of benefits - the liar, to the person being lied to and to 3rd parties (any child can grow up to be president). There are lies we tell ourselves to feel good about ourselves (I am a good person) and there are aspirational lies (fake it till you make it). There are lies of omission that use cherry-picked facts and more extreme ones like editing a video to explicitly remove context. There are even lies where you leave out details and let the person being lied to fill in the blanks with whatever confirms their own assumptions.
And that's just scratching the surface. Lying is an enormously complex subject that way too many people are deceived into believing is simple because (in english at least) we lump it all under just one word. If eskimos really have 50 different words for snow, we should have at least 50 different words for lies.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Fluffeh on Monday December 14 2015, @01:40AM
That's a really good comment. I'll add one more in to the mix here:
What happens when I am saying something that I truly believe in, so in that way I am not "lying" but I am wrong - therefore technically not saying the truth. Eg: "Do you sleepwalk?" ... "Nope..." (I have no knowledge or inkling that I sleepwalk) - cut to footage of me sleepwalking...
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Monday December 14 2015, @04:57AM
And there are lies where there are a mix of benefits - the liar, to the person being lied to and to 3rd parties (any child can grow up to be president).
That's not a lie; that's a correct statement of Constitutional law. Any natural-born US citizen is eligible to be elected President.
How likely it is any one particular young child will be elected President depends on what happens over the next 40 or so years of that child's life. That is not something that can realistically be predicted. So the statement is correct as a practical matter as well.
Cynic much?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @09:02AM
> That's not a lie; that's a correct statement of Constitutional law. Any natural-born US citizen is eligible to be elected President.
It is funny that you are proving my point while attempting to dispute it. It is true in only one narrow sense - constitutional law. You are interested in focusing on that one specific sense to the exclusion of all other circumstances. So you are lying by omission.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday December 15 2015, @09:30PM
You're misrepresenting what I said:
How likely it is any one particular young child will be elected President depends on what happens over the next 40 or so years of that child's life. That is not something that can realistically be predicted. So the statement is correct as a practical matter as well.
I'm curious what stupid and incorrect answer you would want to give to the question. I'm guessing something like, "whoever the Koch brothers pick, whoever is the best liar", crap like that, yes?
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Monday December 14 2015, @01:54PM
The linguist that came up with the 50 words of snow theory hadn't properly understood the grammar of the language. It turns out that those alleged 50 words are actually only a few words modified by adjectives, and that combining adjectives to nouns is one of the places where this language chose to put its quota of complexity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @04:05PM
Sounds like a distinction without a difference.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday December 14 2015, @06:56AM
How many of us have lied to our boss over estimates on how long one thinks it will take to do something... knowing full good and well that if you give an honest estimate, your boss will just find someone else who will tell him what he wanted to hear in the first place, and your successor will end up explaining the inevitable overrun?
Me? Been there. Done that.
Those negotiations were the hardest part of the job, when someone else was led to believe that simply getting something in writing would make it so.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]