GORDON BURGHARDT: Some people like roses and others tulips. I've always liked snakes.

[snake rattles]

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And our show today is about deception. And we thought, where better to start than with snakes?

ROBERT: Snakes.

GORDON BURGHARDT: Oh.

JAD: This is where you keep all your snakes?

GORDON BURGHARDT: Well, we keep some of them here. We have a variety of some of the lizards we're working with.

JAD: This is Gordon Burghardt. He works at the University of Tennessee. I paid him a visit recently.

GORDON BURGHARDT: And I have several rooms here where we keep a variety of different reptiles, turtles ...

JAD: And he's got this one little snake that he likes to show off—small guy, about the size of a pencil.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Called a hognose snake.

GORDON BURGHARDT: These are the hognose snakes. You can see this guy's already starting to go into the display.

JAD: And Gordon pops the top off the cage and then does something interesting.

GORDON BURGHARDT: What I'll do is take a ...

JAD: He puts a chicken puppet ...

GORDON BURGHARDT: ... sort of a puppet of a chicken ...

JAD: ... on his left hand.

GORDON BURGHARDT: Right.

JAD: And then with this puppet, he begins to kind of attack the snake or mock attack.

GORDON BURGHARDT: Simulate ...

JAD: Like, peck near it.

GORDON BURGHARDT: ... a bird that might be attacking it.

JAD: What happens next is kind of shocking.

GORDON BURGHARDT: And you can see now how it's hiding its head a little bit. It's coiling its tail.

JAD: First, the snake flips over on its back.

JAD: Oh, there he goes.

GORDON BURGHARDT: There he goes upside down.

JAD: And then it vomits blood.

GORDON BURGHARDT: Blood will even come out of the mouth.

JAD: Then it poos itself.

GORDON BURGHARDT: And now if you notice, he has started to defecate a little bit. It's writhing.

JAD: And then it gets really, really ...

GORDON BURGHARDT: And it'll finally stop.

JAD: ... still.

GORDON BURGHARDT: In fact, it'll stop breathing. And it's all a bluff, all a show.

JAD: Wow.

JAD: I was like, wait. That is—that is no bluff.

JAD: Can I touch him?

GORDON BURGHARDT: Sure.

JAD: But as soon as we took a few steps back from the cage, the snake pops its head up, goes fwoop, unflattens itself ...

GORDON BURGHARDT: And if you come close ...

JAD: ... and there it was alive again.

GORDON BURGHARDT: Yeah. And then it'll start to breathe and gaze around.

JAD: It was lying, basically.

ROBERT: That's pretty good.

JAD: Thank you very much.

ROBERT: Although, you know, as the world turns, it was kind of an ordinary lie, really.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: It was. Sure.

JAD: When was the last time you pooed yourself for a lie?

ROBERT: Well, I could lie to you so beautifully, you would be on your back, tongue out.

JAD: No way, 'cause I would catch you.

ROBERT: And that—no, you wouldn't catch me.

JAD: Yeah, I would.

ROBERT: No, you would not.

JAD: I would totally catch you.

ROBERT: I'm so sorry to tell you this. that's not happening.

JAD: [singing] I would catch you.

ROBERT: No. If it were me, no, you wouldn't. So that's our hour, people who lie ...

JAD: And the people who catch them.

ROBERT: Not.

JAD: To get things started in earnest, let us go to every New Yorker's favorite spot.

ELLEN HORNE: I love that we're at the airport. [laughs]

JAD: John F. Kennedy Airport, of course. Just a little place I like to go to get away from it all. I ended up there with our producer Ellen Horne. We hadn't actually meant to come, but the guy that we had been interviewing ...

PAUL EKMAN: In order for a lie to be betrayed by demeanor ...

JAD: This is him.

PAUL EKMAN: ... there has to be a high emotional ...

JAD: Right in the middle of the interview he had gotten a call.

[phone rings]

PAUL EKMAN: Hello. Hello.

JAD: Said he had to run.

PAUL EKMAN: Oh, that's my ride.

JAD: And we were like, crap, we have more questions. What are we going to do? So we decide to jump in the car with him and there we were in the relaxing presence of men with big guns.

PAUL EKMAN: Well, yes. There's these guys who look like they're in combat uniform for Iraq, and they have automatic weapons.

JAD: In any case, this is Paul Ekman.

PAUL EKMAN: Ekman - E-K-M-A-N.

JAD: He's a security expert. That's what he would be called nowadays. And speaking of security, the reason he's here today at JFK Airport is to talk with JetBlue security, teach them a few things about how they might do their jobs better.

JAD: Okay.

ELLEN: We haven't.

JAD: But ...

SECURITY GUARD: No reporter in a building. That's it.

PAUL EKMAN: How about over in the restaurant?

SECURITY GUARD: Not on JetBlue property.

JAD: ... security kicks us out.

PAUL EKMAN: We are leaving their terminal.

JAD: And the only place it seems we're allowed to stand ...

JAD: How about right here?

JAD: ... is on the concrete median between two lanes of traffic, where Ekman finally pulls out the thing he'd been hoping to show the folks at JetBlue.

PAUL EKMAN: So ...

JAD: So here we have your ...

PAUL EKMAN: My little ...

JAD: ... your very stylish little laptop.

PAUL EKMAN: Yeah.

JAD: Just starting up.

JAD: It's a simple computer program that he promises in about 40 minutes will teach you to peer into a person's soul.

PAUL EKMAN: So we're gonna start.

JAD: Click start. All right.

PAUL EKMAN: And click on the start button.

JAD: Okay. So I'm stepping forward to the computer here. It's loading images. Please wait.

PAUL EKMAN: Stepping up to the bat, waiting for the pitch. [laughs]

JAD: Okay. Whoa! I need to see that one again. That was so fast!

PAUL EKMAN: A-ha.

JAD: Whoa!

ROBERT: What is that?

JAD: I promise I'll tell you, but let me just keep going with this, all right?

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: To explain, Paul Ekman studies faces—the human face. He's probably studied the face more than anyone.

PAUL EKMAN: Up until my work that was published in '78, we didn't really know how many expressions a face could make, and there was nothing like a musical notation for the face.

JAD: So about 30 years ago, he began by examining his own face very closely to see how many muscles are in there—and there are roughly 50. Then he spent the next couple decades trying to figure out how many ways those muscles can combine to form a facial expression.

PAUL EKMAN: And I developed something called the facial action coding system, basically, a muscular scoring system that you can apply to photographs, film or real-life behavior. You just did a one-two for me.

JAD: I—you're numbering my facial expression?

PAUL EKMAN: The one-two is the most common thing in the world. Just raising your eyebrows up is one-two. Five is just raising the upper eyelid. Seven is tensing the lower eyelid.

JAD: All in all, the human face is capable of 3,000 different expressions. That's what he thinks. And as we sat in his publisher's office in midtown Manhattan—this is about an hour before the airport incident ...

PAUL EKMAN: Do you want an example?

JAD: Yeah.

JAD: ... he demonstrated a few.

PAUL EKMAN: Okay. If you fabricate anger, it's very unlikely you'll put in what we call the anger-reliable muscle, which most people can't voluntarily move.

JAD: The anger-reliable muscle.

PAUL EKMAN: Do you want to see what it is?

JAD: Yeah, I want to see where it is. You're tensing your ...

PAUL EKMAN: I'm tensing the red margin of my lips.

JAD: You just look—you look fierce when you do that instantly.

JAD: So if you want to know if someone's mad, look at their lips. Conversely, if you want to know they're happy—like, genuinely happy and they're not just faking it—he says look at their eyelids.

PAUL EKMAN: The skin in between your eyebrows and your upper eyelid in a genuine, spontaneous enjoyment smile, that skin moves slightly down. Hard to detect, but visible if you know what to look for.

JAD: You just did it when you said that.

JAD: Anyways, the reason that we are talking about him here in an hour on lying is because with all the attention that's being paid these days to finding lies by using fancy brain scanners, Ekman is kind of on a crusade to remind us that you don't have to do that. You don't have to look in the brain because the brain is actually directly connected to the face in ways that we can't control.

PAUL EKMAN: All of these muscles are activated involuntarily when an emotion occurs, without your choice.

JAD: Are there things happening on my face, on her face, on any face ...

PAUL EKMAN: That you don't even know about?

JAD: ... that we don't even know—we don't know about?

PAUL EKMAN: And I am seeing them. My God, the naked face! [laughs]

JAD: Which brings me to my new favorite word: leakage.

ROBERT: Leakage?

JAD: Leakage, yes. It is a word you will hear again and again when you talk to anyone in the field of lie-catching. Take, for example, Barry McManus.

BARRY L. MCMANUS: Barry L. McManus. M-C-M-A-N-U-S.

JAD: He's a longtime CIA interrogator.

BARRY L. MCMANUS: Physiological leakage could be anywhere from sweat gland activity,when someone knows that they're misleading you and they break out in a sweat, that's because of the autonomic nervous system that you have no control over.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Basically, telling the truth is easy.

JAD: That is the crux of it, according to Steve Silberman, a reporter for WIRED Magazine.

STEVE SILBERMAN: The truth is kind of sitting there in your brain. Your brain knows it, you say it, no problem. But your brain has to work harder to generate the lie.

BARRY L. MCMANUS: There is an effort. And with that, there's always leakage.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Even in an instantaneous moment.

BARRY L. MCMANUS: Sometimes you even hear it where a person's breathing pattern will change or the sighs that people do. At what particular time did they do it? If you're not trained to look at it, most people ignore it. But ...

JAD: If you've been trained and you know what to look for, according to Barry McManus ...

BARRY L. MCMANUS: It will strike you right in the face.

JAD: Speaking of faces ...

PAUL EKMAN: You're usually talking about ...

JAD: ... the particular brand of facial leakage that Paul Ekman specializes in has to do with something that he calls ...

PAUL EKMAN: What we call a micro facial expression, a very fast facial expression, about 25th of a second.

JAD: Okay, just to—just as an example, let's just imagine, Robert, that you're smiling. Okay?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: But on the inside, as those of us who know you can attest, maybe you've got some rage.

ROBERT: A little. A little bit.

JAD: Yeah, just a little bit. But on the outside, you're smiling. Now a microexpression is when, for the tiniest, tiniest moment, a little bit of that inner rage slips out onto your face.

[sharp screeching sounds]

JAD: And these are just little —like, just fleeting expressions on your face.

PAUL EKMAN: They're usually pretty extreme, but they're very fast.

JAD: It happens constantly, he says. But it's so fast that most of us don't see it at all.

PAUL EKMAN: Most of us don't. And when I say most, I mean about 95 percent of us miss them. But once you learn it, you don't miss them.

JAD: And once you don't miss them ...

[sharp screeching sounds]

JAD: Oop, there's one—according to Ekman, you wake up to the startling possibility that ...

PAUL EKMAN: Lies are everywhere.

JAD: It's enough to make a man obsessed.

PAUL EKMAN: When my daughter was born 27 years ago, I decided that I would take on as a life task to see whether I could lead my life without lying.

JAD: To see whether you could lead your life without lying?

PAUL EKMAN: Yeah.

JAD: That sounds impossible.

PAUL EKMAN: It's very tough. But I'm always looking to see whether there's a way I can solve the problem. It makes it more interesting. I mean, just telling a lie is really dull.

JAD: But you could argue that telling a lie is—it's just what we do.

PAUL EKMAN: No, we don't just do that. Most of the time we lie out of laziness or timidity. I got put in a terrible situation by a friend who had invited me to a dinner party, and the company was dull, and the food was worse. I sure didn't want to go again. So he invites me again about two months later. And I said, "I'm sorry, I can't make it." I'm being polite. It's not true. I could have made it. And he said, "Oh, but we enjoyed having you so much. Tell me a date when you could make it."

JAD: Ooh.

PAUL EKMAN: Now how am I going to get out of that in a polite way?

JAD: Yeah, how do you do—how do you stay true to your principles there?

PAUL EKMAN: I'm prepared. I'm prepared. So I said to him, "Look, the truth of the matter is that at this point in my life, I'm very busy. And there are friends I've had for decades that I don't get enough time to see, and I really can't pursue new friendships."

JAD: But that sort of shows it takes a lot of work not to lie. And for why? For what purpose?

PAUL EKMAN: One, you feel like a Zen hero.

JAD: [laughs]

PAUL EKMAN: Oh, my God, did it again! I can stay truthful. I didn't take the easy path.

JAD: When Paul Ekman began to walk the path of the honest man, he was faced with a question that has plagued other honest men for centuries, which is: what exactly is a lie? Like, how do you define it exactly? Like, I mean, there are different kinds, clearly, and some are definitely more okay than others. Where do you draw the line? Eventually, he settled on two criteria.

PAUL EKMAN: A lie is a deliberate choice ...

JAD: A deliberate choice.

PAUL EKMAN: ... to mislead a target without any notification. So according to that definition, an actor is not a liar, although a good actor—I saw a good actor last night in a play, and I was, for a time, misled.

JAD: [laughs]

PAUL EKMAN: I even had tears because he had misled me. But I was notified.

JAD: Right. So criteria number two is canceled out.

PAUL EKMAN: So that's just not a lie. It's deception.

JAD: In a similar way, bluffing at poker? It's not lying because bluffing is in the rules. It's understood. That's part of the game. So therefore, you are quote, "notified."

PAUL EKMAN: But it depends. Maybe there are rules. With my wife, we're entering our 28th year. My wife taught me that what I'm supposed to say when she comes in with a new dress, I'm not supposed to say, "Gee, that's not a flattering cut," or, "The color is wrong," or, "That's for someone 20 years younger." All of which might be true.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

PAUL EKMAN: I'm supposed to say, "Smashing." So okay, I've agreed to those rules. And the rules I've agreed to is that I will not tell her the truth. And since we've agreed about that, I'm not lying.

JAD: So is this like the poker game where you're allowed to bluff?

PAUL EKMAN: I'm required to.

JAD: You're giving yourself a loophole, though.

PAUL EKMAN: No, no, because she's notified. She knows she can't count on me.

JAD: [laughs] That sounds, like, very lawyerly to me.

JAD: Just then, his phone rings.

[phone rings]

PAUL EKMAN: Hello. Hello, hello. Oh, that's my ride.

ELLEN: So ...

PAUL EKMAN: You want to ride out to JFK with me?

ELLEN: Yeah, absolutely.

JAD: All right. You know how this goes. We pile in the car, go to the airport, get kicked out.

SECURITY GUARD: No reporter in our building.

JAD: So there we were on the median, the center strip at JFK. Coldish winter day, and Paul Ekman finally pulled the thing out of his bag, this new technology that he thinks was gonna help our chances of catching liars at the airport. Basically, it is a computer game.

JAD: It's loading images. Please wait.

JAD: You're shown a face on a screen. The face is fixed in an expression, like a smile, let's say. And then ...

PAUL EKMAN: Waiting for the pitch.

JAD: Okay.

JAD: Pow! Another different expression flashes for a moment.

JAD: Whoa. That was so fast.

JAD: So fast. And then on the screen you're asked, "What was that microexpression?"

PAUL EKMAN: What was it?

JAD: Surprise?

PAUL EKMAN: You got it right. Look at that.

JAD: I was right?

PAUL EKMAN: Hey. Let's try another. Are you ready?

JAD: Okay.

PAUL EKMAN: Whoa!

JAD: I need to see that one again. No, wait. Actually, no, no no. Angry, angry. I think it's angry.

PAUL EKMAN: All right. Let's go and try anger. Whoo!

JAD: I was right?

PAUL EKMAN: Two in a row.

JAD: I started out pretty strong.

PAUL EKMAN: Okay, here we go. Are you gonna get three in a row?

JAD: But then it was all downhill.

JAD: Oh, I didn't even begin to catch that. Contempt? Wrong.

JAD: In the end, after several minutes of this, I ended up getting more wrong than right, which put my microexpression-identifying powers at less than chance. I could have flipped a coin and I would have done better.

ROBERT: But what if you were good at it? What if you were able to identify the particular expressions? What would you know?

JAD: Well, I would know—I guess all I'd really know is that they were concealing something, some emotion.

ROBERT: That's it.

JAD: That's it, yeah. And in fact, on the way over in the car, Ekman said it point blank: if you are looking for some surefire dead giveaway sign of lying, it's just not there.

PAUL EKMAN: Because we don't have a Pinocchio's nose.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Pinocchio: Oh, look! My nose!]

PAUL EKMAN: We don't have something that only occurs when people are lying.

JAD: Really? So there is not, say, muscle number A19, that if it twitches in a certain way, is a bulletproof hallmark of lying?

PAUL EKMAN: Nope. It doesn't exist. That's Pinocchio's nose.

JAD: Is there something close to it on our faces?

PAUL EKMAN: No. There are signs of unusual cognitive load or emotional load, and that can occur for a lot of reasons. And you've got to find out the reason.

JAD: So you're never gonna be able to have an idiot behind the machine, in other words.

PAUL EKMAN: Nope.

JAD: Radiolab will return in a moment.

 

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