For the last few months, my writing time has been spent on the first and second drafts of a long-gestating book laying out my system of credibility assessment.
Credibility assessment is the real-world version of lie detection or deception detection. I call my system Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment (HCCA). Which is a mouthful. Many people say it’s common sense (and that’s what it feels like to me, too). But if it’s common sense, why are so many billion dollars, so much time and energy wasted on deception detection methods using some sort of body-function measuring?
The book will address these questions. In it I’ll lay out the abject failure of the physiological-measurement methods. The horrific foundation of many of these, in the last 20 years, is the huckster Dr. Paul Ekman’s fantasy of microexpressions.
It’s important to recognize Ekman’s scam and the ridiculousness of his microexpressions claims. Before the book lays out HCCA, I spend a chapter debunking Ekman.
The near-final draft of that chapter is below.
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 2001, I worked as a human intelligence operations contractor for American intelligence services. This counterterrorism and
counterintelligence work took me around the world. These projects involved on-the-ground work with local partners, throughout Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, and
in Africa. I was immersed in the local culture and the local language(s). I lived, worked, ate with the locals, side by side, every day. This work required me to make constant, real-time credibility assessments of a wide variety of subjects—in the context of a wide variety of cultures. There was no video-tape to review in a lab for hours later.
I was out of the country, away from my home, wife and kids, for 6 months or more every year. After several years, as our oldest boy entered middle school, it was clear that, for the health of my family, I had to stop traveling so much. I was able to combine my prior experience in instructional design and training with my expertise in
intelligence, and began working in intelligence training, in the US. I worked for a contractor that ran a months-long program to certify junior human intelligence officers. I was responsible for the modules on deception detection and assessment. Before this, I had only focused on my own operations (both intelligence and my commercial work as a headhunter), perfecting my own approach to credibility assessment. With this responsibility, I began noting the popularity of Ekman’s Lie to Me, and learned that government agencies were purchasing Ekman’s microexpressions training. My company had a license, and I completed his online microexpressions training. It was ludicrous, useless, a waste of time. This launched me into an in-depth exploration of the background and roots of Ekman’s claims, and also competing methods of body-based lie detection.
Since that time, I’ve found that the source of many erroneous approaches to deception detection today can be traced to Ekman’s flurry of academic, marketing, and government contracting activities. In summary, Ekman’s body of work is based on his claims of universal expressions of emotion. He claims that all humans, in every culture, exhibit exactly the same facial expressions when they feel specific emotions.
He claims that all human faces show uncontrollable, fleeting (milli-seconds in duration) microexpressions that reveal the universal emotions. Ekman further claims that he can see these fleeting facial contortions, and that by viewing these expressions, he can identify emotions the subject is feeling; and further, Ekman claims, he can use this vision and interpretation of emotions to detect deception. Further, Ekman claims, he can teach others to see and interpret microexpressions for the purpose of deception detection. All these claims are suspect at best, wrong at worst, and useless and not skillful at assessing credibility.
For anyone who’s been immersed in foreign cultures, communicating across cultures, trying to understand the vastly different range of facial expressions, body movements, and foreign language, Ekman’s claims should be self-evidently preposterous. Even in cross-cultural communication between closely related cultures, like American and British, facial expressions and body movements can be hard to read, and cause miscommunication. Between cultures that are more distant, say American and Indonesian, the physical differences of expressions and body movements create chasms of misunderstanding.
As we’ll see in this chapter, reality-based academics have known that Ekman was running a scam for years. Many of them have spoken up—in journals, in Congressional testimony, among other places. Yet, most of them do it in passing, as they are busy with their own real-world work on deception and credibility assessment. My first draft of this book only mentioned Ekman’s microexpressions fraud in passing. I guess the intent was to focus more on HCCA, and less on Ekman. As I moved into the second draft though, I realized that confronting Ekman’s ludicrous claims, and seeing so many people—intelligence, police, and others—being scammed was the main motivator for my beginning to clarify my own credibility assessment method (HCCA). That was also my motivation to begin digging into Ekman, his claims, his silly microexpressions training, TSA’s SPOT, and credibility assessment in general. I realized that I had a treasure trove of sources, written, personal contacts, and knowledge, that I’d collected over the last nearly 20 years.
I came to view Ekman’s activities as similar to Bernie Madoff. Peddling snake oil, they created an aura about themselves that attracted marks. Oozing authority and wisdom, they each claimed expert skills—Madoff in steady returns on investments with his infallible system, and Ekman in instant diagnosis of internal thoughts, intentions, emotions, and deception with his infallible system. Both used public relations techniques to build bullet-proof public personas. Both achieved public acclaim and professional power. Madoff was the president of the NASDAQ stock exchange; Time magazine named Ekman one of the 100 most important men of the 20th century. And both ran empires based on foundations of deceit.
As much as others have critiqued and called out Ekman, there seems to be no comprehensive overview of Ekman’s game. So, while this is not a complete overview, I think that it is a more complete telling of the Ekman microexpressions scam than has appeared elsewhere. This is intended to be a review of how Ekman’s flim-flam developed, a warning of the still-existent Ekman scam, as well as a heads-up that similar kinds of claims that will surely follow.
Ekman’s Devotion to Darwin’s Emotions in Man and Animals
Ekman’s writings and public pronouncements attempt to ground his theories in what he seems to believe is the root of modern science: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and his related writings. Darwin’s 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is Ekman’s touchstone. Darwin delves into facial expressions of animals, theorizing as to the emotions the animals feel during certain actions or facial movements. He continues this theorizing, linking animals’ faces and behavior to human faces and behavior.
Darwin’s massive book is full of conjecture and complicated reasoning, but does not provide evidence. That is, just like Ekman, Darwin was handicapped by the inability to actually measure emotions. In fact, just identifying emotions, and emotional states, is difficult. Emotion researchers today recognize this difficulty, and are much more circumspect in the claims they make.
Some examples of Darwin’s linking physical features and facial expressions with mental states and emotional states are below.
Darwin discussed in detail an insane woman’s frizzy hair, which he guessed was caused by less active sebaceous glands. It appears Darwin believed this was somehow linked to her insanity.
Darwin communicated with many other interested observers, and collected their comments and some illustrations in his book. A Dr. Duchenne appears to have been active in using electric current, sent to various muscles in the face of subjects, to stimulate faked expressions. Darwin includes some illustrations based on Duchenne’s electrically stimulated facial expressions, and records others’ interpretations of the expressions produced. The example here Darwin called fright, horror, or terror. It’s not quite clear what Darwin thought this exercise demonstrated.
Darwin’s objective in his book seems to be supporting his theory that man had evolved from other species, and facial expressions communicating emotion were an example of physical and mental behavior that man had inherited from ancestral species, and that all humans were the same.
We have seen that the study of the theory of expression confirms to a certain limited extent the conclusion that man is derived from some lower animal form, and supports the belief of the specific or sub-specific unity of the several races; but as far as my judgment serves, such confirmation was hardly needed.
Anchoring his career to Darwin’s theories on expressions of emotion and Darwin’s status as a cultural icon, Ekman seized the facial expressions baton from Darwin and ran with it. Ekman, and his followers, seem to simply accept Darwin's assertion that emotions are reflected on our faces, universally and uniformly. An Ekman collaborator, David Matsumoto, boldly stated their beliefs:
Research has documented the existence of seven universally expressed and recognized facial expressions of emotion: joy, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, contempt and disgust…the impact of this finding is immense. It means that all people – regardless of race, culture, ethnicity, age, gender or religion – express these emotions in the face in exactly the same way.
In reality, the Darwin/Ekman facial expressions of emotion edifice is built upon assumptions, stereotypes, exaggerations, and wishful thinking. Ekman’s efforts to
capitalize on these theories has been soundly debunked by other researchers. In response, Ekman resorts to bullying, refusal to share data, and publicity campaigns. His science is weak and lacking.
Evolution of Ekman’s Snake Oil
According to an Ekman follower, his pursuit of universal expressions of emotion began when he stumbled upon unused funding from the US military.
Ekman began his scientific career studying body movements—hand gestures, in particular. He only began examining faces after receiving a grant for cross-cultural studies of non-verbal behaviors. Ekman wrote: I had not sought the grant, but because of a scandal—a research project being used to camouflage counter-insurgency activity—a major [Department of Defense] project was canceled and the money budgeted for it had to be spent during that fiscal year on overseas research, and on something noncontroversial. By accident I happened to walk into the office of the man who had to spend the funds. He was married to a woman from Thailand and was impressed by differences in their nonverbal communication. He wanted me to find out what was universal and what was culturally variable. I was reluctant at first, but I couldn’t walk away from the challenge.[1]
Ekman’s Department of Defense funding paid for his travel to New Guinea. Off he went, bearing photos of actors’ faces in posed expressions, like Darwin’s subjects, simulating Ekman’s theorized seven basic emotions. Ekman went to villages of remote tribes. Ekman, not speaking the language, nor understanding their culture, used an interpreter in his interactions with his experimental subjects. He showed the posed photos to the tribesmen, gave them a list of emotions, and prompted them to select which emotion was portrayed.
Ekman published the results of this activity in a paper, Universal Facial Expressions of Emotion, in 1970.[1] He spun his reported findings as proof of the universality of facial expressions of emotion. This was one of the pillars supporting his later academic and commercial activities.
Reviewing Ekman’s output of academic papers and publications, and his marketing and public relations efforts—interviews, popular press articles, websites, corporate marketing materials, and others—reveals the trajectory of Ekman’s themes and claims. A review of his articles and products provides insights into the development that led to Ekman’s commercial activities.[2]
Ekman’s themes and focus of his activities developed chronologically, roughly, in this order:
· Body movements (hands and others)
· Universal facial expressions of emotion
· Seven basic emotions
· Facial action coding system (FACS)
· Microexpressions
· Uncontrollable microexpressions reveal emotions
· Reading microexpressions
Note that Ekman’s prodigious output does not include any publications on his most outrageous claims that has brought him fame and fortune:
· Interpreting microexpressions/hidden emotions to reveal deception
· Microexpression reading/interpretation to identify terrorists
As we’ll see, Ekman never showed, in the real world, outside an academic lab, or videotape review, that any of his claims worked. He was called out many times, beginning in the 1990s, by academics who disputed his claims. Ekman responded to these challenges vigorously, often publishing his comebacks. Ekman was an expert in academic warfare and sharp replies. But still, there was no evidence that his claimed skills were real. His final response to public debunking, when his SPOT scam was exposed, was to claim that his research supporting the SPOT program could never be published. The reason, Ekman claimed, was that his skills were so powerful and those papers are closely followed by scientists in countries such as Syria, Iran and China, which the United States views as a potential threat.[1]
Gladwell’s Blink Propels Ekman into the Lime-light
From the 1960s to the early 2000s, Ekman plugged away in relative academic obscurity. He was successful in gaining military and intelligence community funding for continued activity on his themes. In 2005, Ekman hit the big time when a media darling, Malcolm Gladwell, featured Ekman’s microexpression claims and his system for coding facial movements (FACS) in his book on intuition, Blink: The power of thinking without thinking.
In his section on Ekman, Gladwell demonstrated what happens when an author falls for a con—the danger of thinking without thinking. Gladwell swallowed Ekman’s patter whole. Ironically, the theme of Gladwell’s book was the power of intuition. Yet, Ekman’s entire microexpressions edifice was built on tedious, hours-long review of videotaped faces. Seeing microexpressions was completely un-intuitive. Ekman’s so-called microexpression training is long, repetitive, computer-based sessions flashing his contrived seven basic emotion photos on screen. In Ekman’s world, identifying and interpreting a microexpression required learning his FACS facial-muscle-coding system, and tediously charting each twitch of each muscle in micro-second-long video clips. Nothing could be further from intuitive.
Gladwell’s best-seller rocketed Ekman into the consciousness of the public. Suddenly, Ekman’s imagined windows to the soul, and Ekman’s claims to be able to both see them, and to interpret them as evidence of deception, were all the rage. A TV show, Lie to Me, soon hit the airwaves.
The show was built around a psychologist who used his keen microexpression spotting skills to identify dastardly liars, solving cases each week in 43 minutes. Ekman was both the technical consultant behind the show, reviewing and correcting storylines, as well as the real-life model for the amazingly proficient lie-spotter star character—a psychology professor.
Propelled by Hollywood and Gladwell to sudden global fame, Ekman seized the opportunity. He established a company to market his lie detection claims. As each episode of the weekly TV show appeared, Ekman published a blog on his company website. He played the role of the all-knowing wise man, possessor of microexpression-superpower, commenting on the microexpression-driven heroics of the hero after each week’s episode aired.
If Gladwell and the Hollywood producers had done a bit of due diligence, they’d have found that Ekman had exactly zero experience identifying microexpressions to reveal deception. That lack of real application didn’t stop the show, nor Ekman. The show, along with the continued buzz from Gladwell’s book, propelled Ekman into super-star status.
Ekman capitalized on his celebrity to break into government lie detection training contracts and speaking engagements. During this period, I was active in the American intelligence community and law enforcement, both in operations and in training. Trainers and trainees, as well as operators, were introduced to Ekman’s microexpressions for lie detection. As with many government initiatives, just like the Emperor’s New Clothes, no one pointed out that there was no substance to Ekman’s claims, that no one had ever used a microexpression to detect deception. Government employees, like the rest of America, was awed by Ekman’s popularity. They accepted Ekman’s claims at face value. Seasoned veterans and young trainees alike sat in front of their laptops to complete Ekman’s silly photo-flashing microexpressions training. No one else, in any of the agencies I worked in questioned the value of Ekman’s farce.
Ekman’s popularity soon resulted in his landing what was likely the biggest contract of his life: an agreement to create a Behavioral Observation unit in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Transportation Security Administration (TSA). His cozy relationship with TSA created the ill-fated SPOT program.
Reality Refutes Ekman’s Pseudoscience
The most succinct and direct refutation of Ekman’s beliefs and claims comes from Vrij, Hartwig, and Granhag’s 2019 paper.[1] These three are at the forefront of the reality-based academic approach to credibility assessment. In this paper, they review the gamut of flawed deception detection beliefs. Under the heading Pseudoscientific Lie Detection, they note that popular lie detection tools…claim that nonverbal behavior holds the key to the search for truth. They note that these methods share the naive psychological view that liars are under emotional pressure, and leak cues to their internal distress through channels that they are not aware of.
They note that these pseudoscience techniques are marketed with the promise to make the consumer better at distinguishing between lies and truths. Besides Ekman’s Facial Microexpressions, this paper specifically calls out: the Reid Method’s Behavior Analysis Interview, Neurolinguistic Programming, and Baseline Approach as pseudoscience. While these reality-based researchers couch their criticisms in academic language, they very clearly call out Ekman and the other body-based methods as fake.
Hartwig, in 2014, addressed Ekman’s lie detection claims in a post on Psychology Today’s website. Her post featured an introduction by Bella de Paolo. Hartwig and de Paolo were even more direct in annihilating Ekman’s fakery. This article was inspired by an earlier article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. De Paolo noted that many people asked questions after the Chronicle article, apparently shocked that Ekman’s fakery was being, even mildly challenged in public. So, de Paolo asked Hartwig, the person who currently really does do the very best and most important research on deception if she would write a critique as a guest post.
Hartwig clearly calls out the Chronicle for is ambivalence in its article about Ekman. She says directly and unapologetically: Is Paul Ekman stretching the truth? The answer to this question is yes. To put it even more directly: Paul Ekman’s claims of deception detection by reading microexpressions are fake. Hartwig dismantles Ekman’s claimed skills and method, point by point. Finally, she summarizes: Ekman’s claim that the face is the most powerful indicator of deception is not only stretching the truth; it is fictional. This is much too kind and much too gentle. The truth is that Ekman’s claims for his method of deception detection are lies.
Ironic, isn’t it? The most well-known and publicly celebrated authority on deception detection, rewarded with millions of dollars in government grants and contracts, is a lying about his lie detection! Wonder if anyone’s ever done a frame-by-frame analysis of Ekman’s face, studying his microexpressions and facial muscles, during his many on-camera interviews about his lie detection claims? That would be an interesting study.
Debunking Ekman’s Foundational Claims: Universal Facial Expressions of Emotion
It’s important to rewind back to the foundation that Ekman built his enterprise upon: Darwin’s foundation of universal expression of emotions in humans. The New Guinea safari Ekman and his friends took and the resulting academic publications laid the cornerstone of his claims. But other academics were paying attention, and were not impressed by Ekman’s efforts. Key among Ekman’s critiques was, and is, the much-less-flamboyant James Russell. Russell is a reality-based researcher in the field of human emotions. He very early saw problems with Ekman’s universality theory and Ekman’s activities in support of the theory.
Russell, in 1994, published an eloquent evisceration of the Ekman school (by that time, Ekman had already formed a clique of slavish followers) of universal human expressions of emotion. Russell’s review of the universality group’s publications to that date was as blandly scathing as it was meticulous. Russell addressed, point-by-point, Ekman’s flawed New Guinea activities, dissecting them in an academic slaughter. Russell’s 40-page article is summarized best by his introduction:
Emotions are universally recognized from facial expressions—or so it has been claimed. To support that claim, research has been carried out in various modern cultures and in cultures relatively isolated from Western influence. A review of the methods used in that research raises questions of its ecological, convergent, and internal validity.
Forced-choice response format, within-subject design, preselected photographs of posed facial expressions, and other features of method are each problematic. When they are altered, less supportive or nonsupportive results occur. When they are combined, these method factors may help to shape the results. Facial expressions and emotion labels are probably associated, but the association may vary with culture and is loose enough to be consistent with various alternative accounts, 8 of which are discussed.
Translation: Ekman claims that facial expressions are universal—all cultures, all the time, everywhere. His claims are accompanied by articles about research he’s carried out. I’ve reviewed his claims, and his research. They are bunk. Ekman used methods and analysis to shape the results to support his desired conclusions. Others have used better methods and analysis and shown that Ekman’s results are not true. Facial expressions are probably associated with emotion, but not as Ekman claims. There are various other alternatives. See the article for a discussion of eight of those.
Russell’s long and productive career is an exemplar of rational and realistic, principled searcher for the truth. As his career developed, he explored different ways of thinking about emotions and the expression of emotions. His work should be the foundation for anyone intending to hypothesize about expressions of emotion. Ekman, instead, bullied Russell, and others, until he retired to cash in on SPOT.
Ekman’s Track Record of No Real-world Success
Ekman seems to have a steamroller of a public relations machine. Beginning with his early Darwinian universal-expressions-of-emotion writing, he regularly appeared in academic articles, popular magazines and papers, and was a regular on the conference speaking circuit. All of his themes melded, and his usual topic, and the snake-oil he began selling, was his claimed prowess at identifying microexpressions. Once observed, Ekman claimed he could link them to emotions, and then detect deception based on his observations. He spoke and spoke and spoke; and wrote and wrote and wrote on this theme. He built a juggernaut of academic and commercial operations around this theme. He sold (and still does sell) online training in microexpression identification (posed faces flash on-screen as you frantically click on your choice of emotions). He peddles courses in FACS. Groups of Ekman aficionados endlessly discuss online which exact facial muscle is twitching in a subject’s face at a specific time-hack in a video. But it seems that no one has ever asked Ekman for real-world examples showing microexpression-spotting detecting deception. After following Ekman since Blink and delving into his vast written record, and corresponding with several specialists in deception, psychology and related fields, I’ve yet to find evidence of Ekman demonstrating a successful example of his claimed ability to use microexpressions to identify deception.
On the other hand, there are at least two case studies that annihilate Ekman’s claims of utility for both his own skills, and his microexpression-based skills training of others. The first is a sad case of claimed child abuse, recovered memories, unethical therapists, all mixed in a vicious child custody battle. Ekman dropped into the case, watched some videos, issued pronouncements, and left. The second case is the absolute, unmitigated $900 million disaster of the TSA SPOT program, designed to identify terrorists traveling by air in the US. After multiple years of Ekman-designed-and-led training of TSA officers in microexpression reading, and hundreds of millions of dollars invested, audits by a neutral government agency determined that SPOT had failed at its stated objective of identifying terrorists. The audits further slammed SPOT’s entire foundation (Ekman’s claimed microexpression pseudo-science, and his claims to be able to train others to apply it) as unscientific.
Ekman’s Only Real-world Deception Detection Case with Follow-up: Jane Doe
Throughout Ekman’s long career, he has claimed that there are indicators, including microexpressions that reveal hidden emotions, that he can see them, that these emotions reveal liars. Yet, there are few cases in which Ekman has demonstrated his skills. In fact, the only such case I’ve found was a tragic case, reported in journal articles in 1997. The case was initially presented as proof of the existence of recovered memories in a 1997 article by Corwin and Olafson.[1] Corwin’s initial report was presented as evidence that repressed memories can be recalled, with the proper prompt. An in-depth review of the case, including investigation and interviews of the subjects involved, was undertaken and chronicled by Loftus and Guyer in a 2002 article, Who Abused Jane Doe? Loftus’s extensive investigation was part of her efforts to debunk at-the-time popular recovered memories phenomenon. Since that time, the generic repressed/recovered memories hypothesis has been soundly disproven and rejected.
In summary, the case involved a vicious child custody battle. The father and step-mother of a young girl, Jane Doe, accused the mother of molesting Jane during baths. Corwin, a psychologist working for the courts, interviewed the girl on videotape at 6 years-old. Corwin took the side of the father, and advocated for the father to gain sole custody. Corwin’s interviews of the girl elicited emotional responses in discussing the alleged incidents. Corwin accepted the father and step-mother’s input about the allegations. He interviewed the girl again 11 years later. He reported that she initially did not remember her early childhood allegations, and only upon prompting from Corwin, and then viewing the videos of her previous interactions with Corwin did she remember the incidents. Corwin viewed her remembering the allegations 11 years later, at his prompting as a recovered memory. Corwin invited Ekman to view the video-taped interviews and analyze the girl using Ekman’s claimed skills. Ekman watched the videos, and provided commentary, which was included in Corwin’s article. Ekman also published his own article expounding on his analysis of the videotapes.
Loftus’s later investigation revealed that the father and step-mother were highly motivated to create allegations that the court could use to sever the mother’s parental rights. Loftus’s investigation revealed that it is likely that the father and/or step-mother coached the girl, planting the incidents in her mind. Combined with the rejection of the concept of recovered memories, the deeper investigation by Loftus appears to reveal that the girl’s original allegations were not true, and were likely planted by others motivated to damage the mother’s case for custody. While the concept of memory, and its linkage to deception is complicated, suffice it to say that it is increasingly clear that memories can seem clear, but actually be false.
Ekman’s analysis of Jane Doe interviews
Corwin’s article provided a transcript of an interview with the girl. Corwin provided the videotapes of the interviews to Ekman. Ekman studied the tapes (in real time and in slowed motion), and provided commentary on his observations. In the transcript, Corwin inserted Ekman’s observational comments. Below are Ekman’s comments (Copied from Corwin’s annotated transcript of the interview of 6-year-old Jane. Numbering is taken from Corwin’s article. See article for the context of Ekman’s comments.):
1. Slight evidence of anger in face and voice
2. Slight pout
3. Slight anger
4. Disgust, seems directed at Dr. Corwin for asking such a question
5. From this point until #6, she shows embarrassment, avoiding eye contact with Dr. Corwin
6. Embarrassment stops
7. Shows embarrassment, avoids eye contact
In Ekman’s paper reporting his analysis of this case, the only addition to the above seven comments was:
The nature of her expressions suggests that she is aware of what she is feeling and showing in her face and voice. This is not so in the second interview.
So, Ekman’s analysis reveals that the girl pouted, was angry, showed disgust, and was embarrassed.
Below are Ekman’s comments copied from the transcript of the interview of 17-year-old Jane. Ekman’s additional comments, from his own paper, are included in brackets after relevant items:
1. Before her reply, she shows microexpression of contempt [cannot be certain who is object of contempt]
2. Micro contempt on face [cannot be certain who is object of contempt]
3. Closes one eye, [coincides with her saying the word remember]
4. One eye closure and eye flutter [coincides with her saying the word remember]
5. flutter [sign of repression, censoring is occurring]
6. One eye closure [coincides with her saying the word remember]
7. Microexpression of fear [I believe is her own fear of what she may discover.]
8. One eye flutter
9. One eye closure [coincides with her saying the word remember]
10. Long closure [sign that she continues to repress memories]
11. Flutter [sign of repression, censoring is occurring]
12. Eyes widen
13. Long eyelid closure [sign that she continues to repress memories]
14. Eye closure [coincides with her saying the word personality]
15. Close eyes and holds eyes [a final effort to not see]
16. Long eyelid closure
17. Micro contempt [cannot be certain who is object of contempt]
18. Flutters, but briefer than before [sign of repression, censoring is occurring]
19. Flutters, but briefer than before [sign of repression, censoring is occurring]
20. Long eyelid closure [sign that she continues to repress memories]
21. Vocal distress from there to #22
22. Vocal distress ends
23. With the word sad, the distress in the voice becomes stronger
24. Contempt [probably toward her mother]
25. One eye closure [occurs when she says the word traumatic]
In Ekman’s solo paper on his observations of the Jane Doe videos, he expounds on microexpressions, noting his belief that they are indications of emotion that is repressed, and that they are a sign of censoring one’s emotions. As usual, Ekman quotes from Darwin’s The Expressions of Emotion in Man and Animals. Ekman begins his analysis by genuflecting to his foundational theorist. He quotes Darwin to interpret Jane’s eye movements: Darwin’s remarks apply to Jane.
With his analysis having no apparent grounding in actual evidence, Ekman claims to be able to read Jane’s mind to determine why Jane sometimes closed one eye: … she is ambivalent about whether or not she really wants to remember and know what happened to her as a child. He further states that he can interpret two-eye closures, and opines that, I have found long eye closures such as these …where repression is occurring and in deliberate lies. Again, focusing on eyes, this time, what he calls fluttering, Ekman also shares his belief, which has no evidence to support it, that I have also noted flutters when individuals are consciously, deliberately lying. Like the microexpression, the flutter…does tell us that censoring is occurring.
Ekman’s mind-reading and conjecturing continue. Among his observations of Jane in the video, he reports seeing: micro contempt, microexpression of fear, contempt, and more eyelid flutter, eye closure, one-eye closure, and he adds in observations of vocal distress for good measure. Interestingly, somehow Ekman can, at times, identify the target of the girl’s micro contempt, and at other times, he can’t. Sometimes Ekman’s analysis of microexpressions/eye flutters notes the simultaneous word uttered at the time of an Ekman-observed microexpression, with an implication that the two are somehow linked, but no explanation of what Ekman believes the linkage to be.
Ekman’s conjectures continue: The micro fear shown at point 7 I believe is her own fear of what she may discover. The contempt shown at point 24 is probably toward her mother. Ekman’s guesses have no empirical or theoretical grounding. He’s just voicing his opinion, and dressing it up with sciencey terminology, and his special microexpression sauce. Sort of like reading tea leaves, astrology, phrenology, or any other pseudoscience.
In his introduction to his paper, Ekman touts his special powers of observation and deception detection: …my time has largely been devoted to the study of expressive behavior—how emotions…and deception may be revealed in facial movement, gesture, and voice. He further notes that he spent significant time with …repeated viewing of the videotaped interviews, both at real time and in slowed motion…. In his conclusion, Ekman refrains from making an overt judgement on the veracity of Jane’s statements in the filmed interviews. But his implied conclusion is that Corwin’s judgment is correct.
This case, and Ekman’s diagnosis of facial expressions and extended commentary on his observations, supporting Corwin’s point of view is unique. I’ve not been able to find any other case of Ekman applying his claimed skills in any record. Ekman’s diagnosis and judgement show that he believed completely the statements later shown to be likely false. The later, more complete, investigation of the case by Loftus, in which she and her team gathered data, insights, and information that Corwin (and Ekman) ignored, came to the conclusion that Jane’s stories of abuse were likely concocted by her father and step-mother, and implanted in Jane’s memory.
Ekman’s published observations and interpretations of Jane’s videotaped face and voice were, at best, useless. At worst, his observations supported a false charge, and assisted the miscarriage of justice in removing the mother’s parental rights.
Ekman’s Grand Finale: TSA’s SPOT Failure
Ekman had been supping at the government funding trough for more than 30 years before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. He’d learned how to manipulate government funding for academic research. Remember his maneuver to capture funding for his trip to New Guinea in the late 1960s. After 2001, Ekman found himself in the catbird’s seat. Suddenly, he was a hot commodity. He promised he had a magical method to see lies on people’s faces and he could teach others to do it, too.
The federal government was panicked after its security regime totally failed. The terrorists who hijacked airplanes and flew them into buildings had more than one interaction with federal officers before they carried out their attack. First, the federal government issued visas to all the terrorists at American embassies overseas. Then, it allowed the terrorists into the country when they arrived. The federal government failed to recognize, identify, or interdict the terrorists at multiple opportunities during their stay in the US. The terrorists passed through airport security screening more than once, with the intent to carry out their attacks, carrying weapons. The terrorists and their planners, funders, and operators came in contact with, or were known to, federal intelligence. Over and over, federal government agencies and officers failed to see through the terrorists’ cover stories and lies. If they had detected the terrorists’ deception, the attack could have been stopped.
In the aftermath of the failures that led to 9/11, the federal government created DHS. Congress approved lavish funding for the new bureaucracy. The reason for DHS’s being was to stop terrorist attacks, keeping the homeland safe. DHS sucked in existing agencies and offices, and created a host of new federal entities. Money flowed into DHS in never-ending torrents. To the embattled (and newly rich) federal intelligence and law enforcement bureaucrats, Ekman’s promises of magic facial lie detection was like a glass of ice water to a man stranded in the desert and dying of thirst. Ekman had a veneer of academic respectability, dozens of peer-reviewed publications. He had a hit TV show. He was great at schmoozing the feds.
DHS was under heavy pressure to stop terrorists from boarding planes. TSA was new and struggling. Ekman’s magic clicked at the right time, in the right place. Around 2005 or 2006, Ekman began negotiating with DHS/TSA. They hatched a plan to put into action Ekman’s claims about microexpressions, leakage, high-stakes lies, his ability to see this all, and to train others to detect deception like he could. Together, Ekman and TSA plotted out an ambitious training cycle for their newly-hired Behavioral Detection Officers (BDO). Of course, the training was Ekman’s magic face-dance-spotting. SPOT was rolled out at airports across the country in 2007.
Government Accountability Office (GAO) Investigation of SPOT: No Scientific Evidence
When SPOT began, American travelers noticed that the old-style security screening had changed. Instead of the old routine: Did anyone give you anything to carry today? Did you pack your own bags?, take off your shoes, put your bags on the x-ray conveyor belt, and walk through the metal detector; now a couple of guys chatted with you before the x-ray. Media reporting started out positively commenting on the innovation, touting the screening flavored with Ekman’s magic. After a couple years, serious questions were raised. The most public reason given for questioning SPOT was profiling. It seemed that more minorities were pulled into secondary screening with SPOT. This was probably true, but that was the least of SPOT’s failings.
By 2010, Congress, pressed by media and public outcry, called on its accountability auditing agency, the GAO, to investigate SPOT. GAO’s first report, in 2011, was 89 pages of carefully worded, foot-noted, supported by facts discovered in its audit. The report’s conclusion was scathing.
TSA deployed SPOT nationwide without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment. A scientific consensus does not exist on whether behavior detection principles can be reliably used for counterterrorism purposes, according to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
Translation: The TSA/Ekman SPOT behavior observation program was pseudoscience. GAO’s careful review of the entirety of Ekman’s program—his foundational claims, his training, his methods, the sordid mass of Ekman’s decades-long facade--found there was no scientific basis for his claims.
TSA and Ekman’s response was to double-down. They funded a contract to attempt to validate Ekman’s pseudoscience. The external reviewers, government contractors, formed a panel of Subject Matter Experts. One of the experts? Paul Ekman! Pretty sweet gig—sitting on an expert panel reviewing the credibility of the science claims for a multi-hundred-million-dollar program you created based on your own claims of skills. Bernie Madoff would have blushed.
As SPOT developed and disintegrated, I was following closely. My 2013 Freedom of Information Act request for all TSA documentation of Ekman’s activities and contracts for SPOT was stonewalled for two years. TSA’s first response was to send a form for me to have Ekman sign approving release of related documents. When they admitted that Ekman was a public figure government contractor, not a private person, they next, after six months’ delay, responded that TSA had no documents with Ekman’s name on them. Another year passed. It took a lawyer prodding TSA on my behalf, before TSA finally released more than 250 pages of documents regarding SPOT and Ekman. Nearly everything in the documents was blacked-out (redacted), except for Ekman’s name.
Congressional Testimony on SPOT: Ekman versus Hartwig—Hartwig Scores a Knock-out
TSA resisted the pressure created by the release of GAO’s 2011 report. Media reports and public outcry forced Congress to hold hearings on SPOT.[1] Ekman was called as a witness in defense of his claimed science, the basis of the entire SPOT program.
In his brief oral testimony, Ekman made his usual fantastic claims:
Now, unlike any other research team, we have performed the most precise comprehensive measurements of face, gesture, voice, speech, and gaze, and those measurements have yielded between 80 and 90 percent identification of who is lying and who is telling the truth.
His body measurement magic identifies 90% of liars, Ekman told Congress, under oath.
Ekman’s brief and rambling oral testimony was supplemented by a 20-page written statement. In this written statement, Ekman’s claims of lie detection skills and accuracy centered on two issues: hot-spots, and high-stakes lies. His hot-spots idea is that there are several body-measurements that can be combined to identify liars. Besides microexpressions, Ekman included gesture, posture, voice, gaze, and speech as hot-spots. His other claim to possess special lie detection skills and insights, separating him from other academics in the same specialty was that he only dealt with high-stakes lies. Ekman claimed that his research focused on high-stakes lies, unlike other researchers whose lab studies were not high-stakes.
Ekman also touted his online microexpressions training, and bragged about his training of American, British, and Israeli police, intelligence and other agencies.
Maria Hartwig was called as a representative of actual deception experts to refute and debunk Ekman. Her quiet evisceration of Ekman begins on page 70:
… the issue of detecting deception from facial cues to emotion…is based on the idea that liars experience emotion or fear of detection and that observing these facial cues can help you detect lies. I don’t have time to go into details about the theoretical problems of that assumption, but in brief, it invites both misses and false alarms. It may miss travelers with hostile intentions who don’t experience these emotions or who successfully conceal them and it may generate false alarms for travelers who don’t have hostile intentions but experience these feelings for other reasons.
Most people are quite surprised to hear that there is very little evidence on the issue of these so-called microexpressions, brief displays of an underlying emotion that are revealed automatically. I am aware of only one study published in the peer-reviewed literature conducted by Steve Porter and his colleague, Leanne ten Brinke, in the Journal of Psychological Science, they examined the prevalence of microexpressions in falsified and genuine displays of emotion. They found no complete microexpression in any of the 697 facial expressions they analyzed.[1]
Hartwig, with no training to sell, or failed multi-million-dollar government program to protect, relied on her reality-based expertise in deception research. She said that there is no evidence to support using microexpressions as indications of deception. In fact, the only study she knew of on microexpressions as indicators of deception found exactly zero complete microexpressions in the hundreds of expressions analyzed. In summary, not only are microexpressions useless for detecting emotions, hidden or overt, or deception, but they are pretty much imaginary.
Hartwig finishes her brief oral testimony by driving a stake into Ekman’s nonsensical claim that he couldn’t publish his findings on detecting deception with microexpressions because of national security. Ekman’s public claims that his secret sauce was so powerful that it must be hidden so that enemies couldn’t learn his methods were ludicrous, and Hartwig said so, nicely. (Note that anyone could pay the fee and take Ekman’s online microexpressions training courses.):
I object to [Ekman’s] deliberate strategy not to publish research for three reasons. First, in that the enemy, whoever they are, a potential terrorist or criminals, may be aware of results from research applies to all deception research, so if we took this argument seriously, we shouldn’t publish any lie-detection research because it may ultimately help the enemy.
And second, it is my understanding of the theory of micro-expression that these are automatic involuntary displays, and if that is the case, I fail to see how knowledge about these behaviors or the research on these behaviors could help the person.
And third and most importantly, these claims of micro-expressions as cues to deception or the cues included in the SPOT program, they are empirical questions that should be addressed with data and subjected to scientific peer review. And given the amount of resources that have already been spent on this program, I think such validation is absolutely necessary.
Translation from academia-speak:
· If Ekman’s hokey deception detection research cannot be published because bad guys might read it, then all deception research should be secret, too.
· Ekman’s own theory of microexpressions is that they are involuntary and universal—that is, uncontrollable. How can knowing about such automatic face-twitching be helpful to terrorists?
Ekman’s entire SPOT program is based on microexpressions and his claims that he can see them and interpret them, and that he can train others to do the same. Ekman’s claims, especially in light of the multi-millions of taxpayer money spent on his claims, should be supported by real-life testing and proof.
GAO’s 2013 Report: Defund the Mess! Ekman Cult Slapped Down
In response to TSA’s failure to take GAO’s 2010 recommendations, Congress directed GAO to audit TSA again, two years after the first audit. GAO’s second report, in bland bureaucratic language, cut Ekman’s baby wide open and drained the blood from its veins.
GAO’s report was unusually direct and stated its recommendation in the title of the report: TSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection Activities.
Congress should consider the absence of scientifically validated evidence for using behavioral indicators to identify threats to aviation security when assessing the potential benefits and cost in making future funding decisions for aviation security.
Translation: GAO’s investigations found that SPOT’s Ekman magic face-reading was not based on scientifically validated evidence. GAO recommended that Congress stop funding SPOT. That is, the 900 million dollars spent from 2007 to 2013 was flushed down a black hole. Not one terrorist had been identified, stopped, or arrested.
TSA resisted the pressure, and SPOT sputtered along. Ekman quietly faded out of the TSA spotlight. In 2016, TSA killed the SPOT name and renamed the program Behavior Detection and Analysis (BDA). TSA redid its BDA checklist of alerting behaviors. The program continues today, with Ekman and microexpressions removed from its bag of tricks.
The best epitaph for the grave of Ekman’s huckster-driven nearly billion-dollar failure came from another reality-based deception researcher, Charles Honts. In Weinberger’s Nature (2010) article that quoted Ekman’s excuse for hiding any evidence to support his SPOT claims, Honts pronounced the still-twitching body of SPOT dead:
Calling SPOT an abject failure, he [Honts] says that the government would have done better to invest first in basic science, experimentally establishing how people with malintent think and respond during screenings. That work, in turn, could have laid a more solid foundation for effective detection methods.
Sources and Notes
Darwin, C. (1872). p. 367. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. University of Chicago Press.
Matsumoto, D. (n.d.). Humintell: The Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion, Update 2021. Retrieved August 25, 2023, from https://www.humintell.com/2021/01/the-universality-of-facial-expressions-of-emotion/
Myers, P. (2010). Lie spotting: proven techniques to detect deception. St. Martin’s Press.
Ekman, P. (1970). Universal Facial Expressions of Emotion. In California Mental Health (Vol. 8, Issue 4).
Ekman, P. (n.d.). Paul Ekman Group--Journal Articles. Retrieved August 25, 2023, from https://www.paulekman.com/resources/journal-articles/
Weinberger, S. (2010). Airport security: Intent to deceive? In Nature (Vol. 465, Issue 7297, pp. 412–415). https://doi.org/10.1038/465412a
Gladwell, M. (2005). Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. Little, Brown and Co.
Few details are publicly available on Ekman’s relationship with DHS/TSA/SPOT. After more than a year of fighting for FOIA materials on SPOT and Ekman, DHS provided me with hundreds of pages—about 90% redacted. It was clear that Ekman and some specific DHS officers were quite chummy. The exact financial rewards that flowed to Ekman were redacted.
Vrij, A., Hartwig, M., & Granhag, P. A. (2019). Reading Lies: Nonverbal Communication and Deception. Annu. Rev. Psychol, 70, 295–317. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010418
Hartwig, M., & dePaulo, B. (2014). Telling Lies: Fact, Fiction, and Nonsense, by Maria Hartwig Should you believe Paul Ekman, world’s most famous deception researcher? Applied Cognitive Psychology. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201411/telling-lies-fact-fiction-and-nonsense-maria-hartwig
Shea, C. (2014, October 10). The Liar’s ‘Tell’ Is Paul Ekman stretching the truth? https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-liars-tell/
Russell, J. A. (1994). Is there universal recognition of emotion from facial expression? A review of the cross-cultural studies. Psychological Bulletin, 115(1), 102–141. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.115.1.102
Aviation Security: TSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection Activities. (2013). GAO-14-159. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-14-159
Corwin, D. L. (1997). Videotaped discovery of a reportedly unrecallable memory of child sexual abuse: Comparison with a childhood interview videotaped 11 years before. Child Maltreatment, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/1077559597002002001
Loftus, E. G. M. (2002). Who Abused Jane Doe? The hazards of a single case history: Part 1 and Part II. Skeptical Inquirer, 26(3), 24–32.
Ekman, P. (1997). Expressive behavior and the recovery of a traumatic memory: Comments on the videotapes of Jane Doe. Child Maltreatment, 2, 113–116.
Committee on Science, S. and T. (2011). Behavioral Science and Security: Evaluating TSA’s SPOT Program. In Evaluating TSA’s spot program. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112hhrg65053/pdf/CHRG-112hhrg65053.pdf
DHS/TSA. (2017). DHS/TSA Internal Documents (Emails, internal reports, other) Responsive to FOIA for Paul Ekman and TSA/SPOT.
United States Government Accountability Office. (2013). Aviation Security: TSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection Activities. GAO-14-159. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-14-159