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Detecting Deception in Politics

Will you be tuning in to watch the Vice Presidential Debates tonight? A warning: don’t trust every media analyst you see or read who invokes body language.

In fact when it comes to pundits commenting about body language in the media, “what you see is often more entertainment than science and it can contribute to misinformation,” says Vincent Denault, a communication researcher at the University of Montreal.

Dr. Matsumoto agrees. In a recent interview for Undark Magazine, he says while it is certainly true that there’s a lot of great information a person can get from nonverbals, you have to be careful.

What is Body Language?

Body language is also known by another term called Nonverbal Behavior.

Nonverbal behavior is a complex signal system of the body to communicate our mental states, thoughts and feelings. It’s one of the most complex signal systems of the body because it includes different channels like facial expressions, tone of voice, hands, gestures, body posture, the way we walk- even how much space we take when we talk with each other, and whether or not we touch each other.

Each of those channels can communicate different messages. They communicate specific or generic emotions. They communicate cognitive processes or specific cognitions; some kind of physiological states and some other things.

When you put all those channels together with all those signals it’s really easy to see why nonverbal behavior or body language is one of the most, or the most, complex signal system in the body.

What channel should you focus on?

Research has shown that of all of the channels and all of the messages coming at us, one of the most important is facial expressions of emotion. That’s why we focus on facial expressions of emotion here at Humintell.

That doesn’t mean that everything else is not important because we also focus on the other things, like gesture and voices and everything else. But facial expressions of emotion are the most important channel that we have.

When we’re trying to observe body language, it’s just so overwhelming because there’s so many channels and messages.

For example, it is an indisputable fact that facial expressions can convey certain types of emotional states. But faces are used to do a lot of other things such as signal cognition and cognitive processes, signal specific verbal words or phrases, speech articulation, signal physical exertion or physical effort and other idiosyncratic things.

Other nonverbal motions like a shrug can signal certain types of emotional states as well. But Dr. Matsumoto explains that there’s a lot of noise, too; people do all kinds of things with their bodies. For example, a person’s raised eyebrow could be express disbelief — but it might also signal discomfort or surprise. The same hand gesture could mean different things in different cultures.

What about Catching Liars?

When it comes to assessing credibility, recent research suggests that instead of using single, specific behaviors to detect deception, nonverbal behavior assessed across multiple channels is a more fruitful way to differentiate truthtellers from liars.

In fact, Dr. Matsumoto and his team of researchers at Humintell have recently published articles related to this exact topic.

Remember, there is no Pinnochio effect where one single behavior automatically means a person is lying.

Want to determine if someone is being truthful (or not)? Validated indicators are a good place to start. Those are those indicators that have been tested in research and found to reliably differentiate truth tellers from liars across studies, investigators and laboratories. And, they have also been vetted in the field.

One of the verbal indicators of deception that Dr. Matsumoto often thinks about when he watched politicians answer questions is known as “Extraneous Information.” This is information that does not answer the question posed, and may be used to justify the liars’ actions, deflect the question because they may not want to respond to that specific question, help liars distance themselves from the act of lying or the content of the lie, or aid liars in exerting control over the interview.

Of course extraneous information, like any indicator of truthfulness or deception, is never failproof or foolproof as a sure sign of truth telling or lying. But they do give signs to the mental state of the individual, and when used correctly in a probing, strategized interview can be very effective in helping investigators to ferret out truth from lies.

The post Detecting Deception in Politics first appeared on Humintell.

Contempt and Politics

Emotions shape much of our lives, so it would make sense that they impact how we handle political discussions as well.

In his column with The New York Times, Arthur Brooks tackles the difficult question of political polarization. A great deal of political science scholarship has sought to examine how people’s attitudes are drifting increasingly farther apart and what this means for our two parties to work together. While most scholars focus on cultural values, economic interests, or other politically situated opinions, Brooks suggests that it is much more simple: we feel contempt.

He begins by explicating some recent research on “motive attribution asymmetry.” Such research has found that we tend to attribute loving motives to our political allies and hateful motives to our enemies, regardless of our party.

It is this asymmetry that allows us to develop a profound sense of contempt for the other side. This goes beyond concerns over incivility, and into this particularly powerful emotion’s pull on our evaluations. Contempt, he says, creates a sort of addiction, as social media and political elites leverage it to demonize political opposition and make compromise impossible.

Not only does contempt make compromise difficult, but it can also make us profoundly unhappy. The American Psychological Association found that experiences of contempt can make individuals feel rejected by their peers, leading to anxiety and depression.

And most people don’t want to feel this way. Most polls find that strong majorities want civil disagreement and compromise, rather than hostility and contempt.

Brooks’ diagnosis of contempt as the source of many political ills is not without evidence. As we blogged on some time ago, contempt, alongside anger and disgust, can predict political and group-based violence. One of the first steps in dehumanizing out-groups is the cultivation of a feeling of contempt towards that group.

Contempt is deeply rooted in a sense of who other people are, and it often drives from an evaluation that they are lower in a hierarchy and lacking of respectable status. This can translate to a sense that that person is bad, disgusting, or not worthy of moral consideration.

Brooks notes that one way in which contempt can shape our political interactions is how it has increasingly eroded friendships. He contends that 1 in 6 Americans stopped speaking to a friend or family member during the 2016 presidential campaign.

If this is because of contempt, then it isn’t the first time contempt has killed a relationship. In fact, Dr. John Gottman, a renowned expert on emotions and relationships, described contempt as one of the “four horsemen” of the relationship apocalypse.

Expressing Corruption?

Many of us worry about corruption amongst political elites, but could it be possible to actually recognize it in their faces?

In a pretty creative study, a team of psychologists from the California Institute of Technology sought to explore whether people could detect evidence of corruption by government officials by providing them with pictures of their faces. This study helps shed light both on efforts to effectively read other people but also on efforts by citizens to better evaluate our elected representatives.

While this may seem initially like a pretty far-fetched idea, there is a long history of research showing that people tend to make competent decisions about people’s trustworthiness from images of their faces. This has even been applied to potential leaders, where prosocial outcomes lead to positive evaluations.

However, this study makes an important break in shifting from just evaluations of a person’s charisma and perceived competence to actually determining if they have been practicing deception. Still, there is some prima facie credibility in that guilty expressions are generally identifiable.

To answer their question, the study authors undertook a series of experimental designs, showing images of politicians and asking participants to identify salient traits, such as corruptibility, dishonesty, and selfishness but also including more prosocial tendencies like competence and ambition.

In the first of these studies, participants were exposed to a series of 72 photos of actual elected officials in the United States. Of those, half had been convicted of some form of corruption, such as violations of campaign finance laws.

Before exposing participants to these photos, they were prompted with an instruction that they would have to designate the official’s level (1-5) of a given trait as quickly as possible, and they only had about four seconds to do so. This sought to ensure that people were judging based on spontaneous and initial reactions of emotional recognition.

Subsequent studies functioned similarly in an effort to strengthen the generalizability of any findings. This included varying the level of government that a given official held or using variants of the initial traits.

Overall, this series of experiments found broad support for the ability of participants to identify political corruption in faces of elected officials. This held up across variants, suggesting that it would apply more broadly outside of a limited experimental setting.

While many questions about generalizability and the precise causal mechanisms remain, this ambitious study does give us further evidence that our ability to read faces and detect deception has great potential even in photographs.

It would of course be interesting to see if an observer professionally trained in deception detection and people reading would do better.

In the meantime, check out some of Dr. Matsumoto’s work on politics and deception!