Buying
a used car? Making a political donation? Does the guy taking your money have a
shifty look? If so, you’ll probably think twice before believing those
silver-tongued blandishments.
The
received wisdom is that if the person’s eyes keep looking up to the right, they
are lying so steer clear. If the eyes keep wandering up to the left, you can go
ahead, the guy is trustworthy. Well, Wiseman et al are too wise to go along with that and have put it to the
test with some experiments (1).
32
canny Scots undergraduates were set up to pretend to put a cell phone in an
office but in fact stuff it in their pocket and then lie about what they saw in
the drawer that they put the phone into. They ran through the procedure again,
but this time they actually put the phone in the drawer after rifling through
so the could report out what they saw truthfully. Their eye movements were
carefully logged. Coding was done both by the experimenters and another group
of undergrads.
Results?
No agreement with the eyes right or eyes left theories, so they got serious
with videos of ‘real’ people pleading on TV for the return of abducted
children. Half of the 52 videos showed people who later had compelling evidence
against them that they had been responsible for the disappearance and hence
were lying.
Everybody
looked at the camera. No flicking eyes up to the right or left. Looks like we’re
back to the polygraph, but maybe not. We pickup on a plethora of non-verbal
signals and have long, long ago learned to put these together to decide if we
think a guy is straight up or crooked as a corkscrew. The trouble starts when
we listen to the blandishments.
