Lying and Eye Movements not linked

[David Baxter PhD]

New Research Into Lying and Eye Movements
by Tina at Tourette Syndrome Forum
July 13, 2012

The Eyes Don't Have It: New Research Into Lying and Eye Movements

ScienceDaily (July 11, 2012) ? Widely held beliefs about Neuro-Linguistic Programming and lying are unfounded.

Proponents of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) have long claimed that it is possible to tell whether a person is lying from their eye movements. Research published July 11 in the journal PLoS ONE reveals that this claim is unfounded, with the authors calling on the public and organisations to abandon this approach to lie detection.

For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth.

Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) tested this idea by filming volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, and then carefully coded their eye movements. In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the films and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of the volunteers' eye movements.

"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills,? noted Wiseman.

A final study involved moving out of the laboratory and was conducted in collaboration with Dr Leanne ten Brinke and Professor Stephen Porter from the University of British Columbia, Canada. The team analysed films of liars and truth tellers from high profile press conferences in which people were appealing for missing relatives or claimed to have been the victim of a crime.

"Our previous research with these films suggests that there are significant differences in the behaviour of liars and truth tellers," noted Dr Leanne ten Brinke. "However, the alleged tell-tale pattern of eye movements failed to emerge."

"A large percentage of the public believes that certain eye movements are a sign of lying, and this idea is even taught in organisational training courses. Our research provides no support for the idea and so suggests that it is time to abandon this approach to detecting deceit" remarked Watt.

If you want to read more, here are some other links to news about this research:

It's (Not) All in the Eyes: Eye Movements Don't Indicate Lying - ABC News

New research proves you can hide your lying eyes - from the Examiner

The Eyes Don?t Have It: Lie Detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming - the original research article

 

[icthus]

Interesting. Is there any correspondence between avoidance of eye-to-eye contract and lying in confrontational settings (Now son, did you take a cookie when I told you not to?), or is such avoidance merely a confidence (as opposed to guilt) thing? Or is it cultural? I understand in some cultures for a woman to return the gaze of a man is considered a sexual come-on. Or in other cultures, avoidance of eye contact is a sign of social deference or avoidance of aggression even between members of the same sex. But then I seem to recall a youtube video in which a dog or two displayed facial expressions (including lack of eye contact) a human might interpret as guilt feelings in the dog, I suppose set on by tone of voice in the human speaker in context of "bad dog" behavior. And I have received what appears to me to be signs of aggression from a strange (i.e., in hindsight feeling threatened) dog or two I looked at face-to-face a little too long. And again in humans is there any correspondence with the reasons why EMDR works on the flip side? I know, too many issues at once, but I wonder.