Trusting Can Be Dangerous

Evaluating truthfulness

December 8, 2015 Misjudging a Peron I have spent a lot of time in the last thirty years advising police, both regional and national, on how to evaluate truthfulness. You can see some of the training tools we used here. Police make mistakes, not just with black people, although implicit or explicit racism causes a higher rate of mistaken judgments …

Ineffectively Testing the Effectiveness of TSA

The SPOT program

November 11, 2015 Trouble with ineffective testing TSA personnel in the SPOT (Screening Passengers with Observational Techniques) program have come under repeated, unjustified criticism. Their failure to catch people pretending to be bad guys is totally irrelevant to whether they can, or will, be able to catch the real bad guys. To test that, we have to get back to …

5 Signs of Lying That Aren’t as Foolproof as You’d Think

Think you can spot a liar? Think again.

November 2, 2015 As seen on Yahoo Health by Temma Ehrenfeld Too bad every liar isn’t Pinocchio, with a tell-all nose. But do our faces give lying away in more subtle ways? The answer is often yes — though the science of exactly how is surprisingly complex. For many people, lying is stressful — so you might think that that …

Catching Liars

What you need to know

August 2014 Science Fiction From a distance of twenty feet, without your knowledge or consent, the surveillance cameras, microphones and physiological sensors apply computer algorithms to process your gait, facial expression, gestures, voice, posture, heart rate, blood pressure and skin temperature — determining within seconds if you are lying or telling the truth. This is “Diogenes,” a machine capable of …

Spotting Poker Bluffs

Can you tell when someone is bluffing?

May 2014 The game has changed now that TV broadcasts people playing poker In the old days not a word was spoken, and that tradition continues today in some venues. But lies had to be spotted; bluffs called. I learned about this from winners of the International Poker Tournament held each year in Las Vegas. It costs $15,000 to enter …