Exactly, the only thing this sort of stuff can detect outside of context and an established "baseline" of expression for a given individual (which takes time and multiple examples to ascertain) at best is neurosis or emotional conflict. The issue isn't even the "data", it's the interpretation of that data, or rather maybe in these cases involving highly complex human facial and verbal expressions it's impossible to disentangle the one the from the other.
It gets even worse. An extremely disturbing fact is that many *_Police Officers_* - and especially *Police Detectives* - believe absolutely that they have a heightened ability to detect *_Lies_* & *_Guilt_* in suspects. When questioned by researchers, they base these skills in both: • Personal Intuition from years of experience in dealing with criminals ( which can be indistinguishable from *Confirmation/Racial Bias* ). • Intensive training in techniques which allow you to read a suspects *_Micro-Expressions_* / *_Body Language_* / *_Subconscious Emotions_* / etc. ( which are far often based in *_Pseudo-Scientific Woo_* , just like many of those *TH-cam* characters you've discussed in this video. ) If you're innocent of a crime, but get taken in by police for interrogation anyway, then your best option is to: 1 - *_Request a Lawyer_* 2 - *_Assert Your Right to Silence ( & STFU )_* ~ ~ ~ Check out this interesting report from *The Intercept:* *_THE JUNK SCIENCE COPS USE TO DECIDE YOU’RE LYING_* _Leaked documents detail law enforcement trainings in lie detection techniques that have been discredited by scientists._ tinyurl.com/y3jz8n63
thank you for this video. these "body language experts" fail to take a lot of circumstances into account - culture (american culture on the east coast insisting eye contact is a sign of respect, versus native communities that view eye contact as aggression; cultures and countries with different standards of personal space; small gestures that vary from place to place in meaning) neurodivergence or mental illness or trauma (all conditions in which eye contact induces anxiety, or in which fidgeting is a necessary form of self-soothing, or just in which expressions can lie outside the "norm") and upbringing (a combination of trauma, of the culture you are exposed to, of how people expect or demand you respond; the difference between training yourself to have a pokerface because showing emotion was punished some way versus never guarding your expression because open emotion was encouraged) there's so many ways this pseudoscience is flawed and it has become something actively used to persecute people who fall outside of accepted norms for "honest body language"
I have a hard time with eye contact and always look left before and during speaking to people and I’ve had it pointed out to me that I do that “so I must be lying” so many times, especially when I was still in school. I do it when I’m talking for more than like one sentence because I don’t like holding eye contact for more than a few seconds at a time. But any time I tell someone a story or what I was doing over the weekend or whatever they’d be like “why are you looking away from me, you’re lying.” And it always made me super skeptical of people who say they can tell when someone’s lying.
Watson's Law: if you watch five videos on the same topic, within a week, youtube's algorithm will recommend you the stupidest video in existence on that topic.
@@Dorian_sapiensWe should definitely fine tune that number with some experiments. Show of hands who's willing to junk up their recommendations feed for science?
It’s easier to tell if someone is uncomfortable, than it is if they’re lying. But correlation doesn’t equal causation. And many truths are less comfortable than lies. And what is truth anyway?
Love this one. I'm a former military interrogator, over 2000 interrogations. I've taken the micro-facial expression course, and other body language courses, and they all boil down to watching for multiple deviations from an established baseline. They don't tell you a person is lying, but that a certain topic causes them stress.
Training on how to tell if someone is being deceitful (this is an important distinction) is a common part of the process for various people working in "law enforcement" or I suppose it would be more accurate to say it's part of the training for people who are involved in interrogation of some sort. Police, to TSA agent, lawyers, ect. I never went through the training myself but I can remember how annoyingly smug my coworkers were after they went through the training and I know they even used to with their children. If it is in fact a psuedo science then it has a much further reach than you realize.
the series "lie to me" did a good job on two things: pointing out, that the polygraph is bogus and that torture is not just morally wrong but also not a good way to get information.
I didn't realise this was a big genre on TH-cam until that viral "analysis" of Brie Larson where the voiceover is petty and snide as hell, but it confirms what everyone who wants to hate her thinks so it garnered a huge audience. In that interview, she was sat up very straight and a little stiff between Chris Hemsworth and Don Cheadle which was interpreted as her trying to be taller than Chris Hemsworth (lol) because she feels angry and insecure. Don Cheadle came out afterwards and said it was because the hair stylist kept having to rush out and fix her ponytail so she was trying to sit very still and not mess it up. It was also unfair to compare her lack of familiarity with the original avengers lineup as she's a latecomer and wasn't in many scenes with the others. I didn't even care for Captain Marvel that much, but people had such bad faith takes on every tiny thing she did after she was too openly feminist.
Hi. Also have severe depression! Fallen down the exact same hole XD. I actually went and did the research on body language and all the real experts laughed and said that while body language can give clues... Body language can also lie, or be sending more than one message, sometimes contradicting. For example, many facial ticks and body movements associated with "lying" by these self appointed experts, are actually just associated with stress or excess energy. If these people tried to spot when I was lying, they'd have to say I never stopped lying because as well as depression, I have general anxiety that occasionally flares up into full agoraphobia, and an emotional regulation disorder. If I'm talking to others, I'm regulating stress, hiding emotions, carefully picking through my brain to carefully craft what I'll say next. Not lying, but carefully regulating everything so I don't become a social outcast
I have to also add: even inconsistencies within a persons retelling of what happened might not be a lie. It could be, but it could also just how the person perceived the event, which might be flawed.
IMHO, people telling falsehoods that they genuinely believe are true, should not be called liars. (And conversely, people telling truths they genuinely believe are false, should.) I recognize that others may disagree with me here, but I wouldn't call Bob Lazar a liar if he believes his own crazy claims. ( @8:21 )
I think it's probably possible to tell whether someone's lying by looking at their body language, but that requires actually knowing and observing the person and how their body languages changes when they say things you know are untrue. I could well be wrong, though. And, further, not everyone knows they're lying when they "lie"- they could easily be mistaken, particularly with things like recalling things under hypnosis being popular enough that I know about them under my rock. There's also the faultiness of human memory at hand- we're not tape recorders, memories aren't actually recordings of an event as much as they are instructions for how to compose that event in your mind, and the brain rewrites over them every time we review a memory.
Excellent video, Rebecca. Around the time of Bill Clinton's "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is", Oprah had a body language expert on and was constantly trying to pin everything down to a simple "this movement means lying." Try as the guy might to explain that it was all a LOT more complicated than that, she just blithely ignored it all...
Remember Oprah brought the world Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil, both people who have actual medical degrees, but are nonetheless firm believers in pseudoscience.
5:19 I mean... people do it all the time. Usually the same type of people who do the remote lie detection crap. If I had 1 Euro for every drama channel that regularly diagnoses the subjects of their videos with Antisocial Personality Disorder, PMS or Autism I could buy the stock to start my own pyramid scheme. Great video!
Yeah, I watched that video and I couldn't complete it. When he said that Lazar predicted element 115, I was screaming at the monitor. Lazar said that it would be very stable; Instead, its half-life is 2 seconds. So if he took out 200 pounds of element 115, he would be dead from all the radiation. He also suggested that it would create anti-mater if you hit it with a particle beam and that it could manipulate gravity through the strong force. Of course, none of that is true.
A few of those body language frauds showed up in my recommendations today (not on this video), and I've _never_ watched anything remotely related. I blame Rebecca for priming the algorithm.
It's been a while since I've read about this, but it seems worth mentioning given the topic of the video. An expert in face-processing turned me onto the fact that Ekman's work on the 6 basic expressions has actually been seriously called into doubt in the face and emotion processing world. Many of his cross-cultural studies were done with shoddy and circular methods, that have failed to replicate with modern attempts. Further, I've been told he used his position on journal review boards to suppress publication of research that contradicted his work, while actively monetizing his own research. This is all a long way of saying, his work on micro-expressions has always struck me as a bit pseudo-scientific given its source, also he is apparently unwilling to submit his current work to peer-review... for reasons... I wish I could remember the specific papers on the issues with the original cross cultural studies, but for the life of me I can't remember their names. Sadly, given how much the universal thesis was marketed and how mainstream it went, I think it may be a while before the issues with this work become widely known outside of the face-processing community. I'm sorry, its too late at night for me to hunt for the original papers I read, and this is buried in youtube comments so I barley expect this to be read by anyone, but here's some stuff: Ironically popsci has a good discussion of how this pop-science is misleading: www.popsci.com/article/science/facial-expressions-arent-universal-we-thought/ This seems to be a comprehensive journal article that partly deals with these criticisms: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/SAUES8UM69EN8TSMUGF9/full
There was in a kid I went to high school with who claimed to be able to do this because of his ninja training. No one believed him in the late 00's and no one would believe them now.
I have a friend who watches him religiously (!) and thinks everything he says is gold. Of course, my friend also thinks Elon Musk is a supreme genius who only wants to help humanity.
I like how you left the unspoken fact that many 'liars' are simply delusional(or that some think they're telling the truth for other reasons) as an example of one of the many ways that even if this type of thing were reliable 'generally' that it still wouldn't hold up in real world situations.
These things fall flat on their face the moment you try and apply any of these practices to someone who is autistic. Since all autistic body language and microexpressions are completely differently hardwired to those of neurotypical folks. It's why communication among either group of people is highly effective, but between members of the two different groups is highly impeded, as studies keep confirming: dart.ed.ac.uk/research/nd-iq/
Hilarious. He literally believes a scam artist but every time a Black person is up for review they are ALWAYS labeled a liar. No matter which channel I see it on that is what happens. Havent seen not a one labeled as honest.
As a theatre director who doesn’t use words like “feeling” or “emotion” with actors (and has trouble physically expressing my emotions), I focus on helping actors create “containers” that give the appearance of what the scene calls for. (If you’re doing a show 8 days a week for a year or more, you’re never going to be able to “be sad” reliably every time. So don’t even try.) Which really means focusing on using the body and voice to create believable actions, behaviors, etc that an actor can do over and over and over again. (Then they don’t have to worry about “being sad” or any of that sometimes incredibly harmful emotional recall nonsense.) I have pulled from this work to help create some of that. In doing so, you also begin to notice micro expressions that indicate when an actor is really “in” a scene or checked out (like thinking about what they’re going to do after rehearsal.) And helping actors notice their micro expressions, they can create more believable performances. (And you can see micro expressions and/or lack thereof when watching actors on TV that sometimes really take you out of it.) What’s interesting, as a director, is that some of these I was already doing unconsciously, but didn’t have the words pinpoint and express to the actors what I was experiencing. Pulling from this work added something concrete to be able to articulate to the actors. (Of course it’s just one of many tools in my toolbox.) This isn’t to validate or defend the scientific claims or use as lie detection, just to show an application that is actually useful.
Paul Ekman is at the very top of all those liars. In fact, the difference between laymen and trained professional in observing lies is very little. Ekman's "95% school" is nothing else than a cash cow. And those youtubers & co are rubbish, so as most of other lie-detection experts, mean those stressing nonverbal signs of behavior. It's still about searching facts, contextual analysis etc.
When it comes to micro-expressions, there are simply too many permutations for someone to consciously and reliably interpret if someone is lying. Any isolated handful of micro-expressions will likely be taken out of context and this is especially true when the "reader" is making indirect observations by watching a dang TH-cam video of the target. Chronic liars don't believe they're lying, so interpreting micro-expressions are no good on them, and other types of liars will likely give themselves away from a host of other (non-micro-expression) tells that anyone with reasonably mature social skills can see through (i.e. hemming and hawing, speaking too fast, too many inconsistencies, back tracking, quick to anger or counter accuse, high levels of defensiveness, avoidance or misdirection, etc).
I've seen a video in which a person claimed that a person that accused someone of sexual assault is lying because their body language would show that they are not traumatized... You can't make that shit up.
The only thing I'd say is you categorically cannot tell if someone is lying just because it isn't possible under the laws of physics or we know isn't true. Like you would not call a child a liar because they believe in Santa or the tooth fairy as far as they know they exist, it is not a lie if they think that they exist, they are not trying to deceive you.
Oooh! In relation to this you should do a video on how the TSA is using the same pseudo science through their behavioral analysis officers to detain travelers without a warrant.
Even trained individuals are terrible at telling if people are lying. Just as a therapist or psychiatrist. It’d make those jobs way easier if they could.
Oh, you want to check out interrogation reviews then. The narrators believe in magical pantomimes. He touched his shoe that means his mother didn't love him.
@@gsmontag either way I like watching the interrogation videos themselves, another channel without commentary had one of a county sheriff being questioned over misuse of resources (fudging time sheets and the like) there's some real morbid fascination with seeing someone caught try to back pedal and dodge their way out of it
Defiantly not. Sure there are some things that a larger percentage of the population may have in common when lying. But people are unique. Not everyone reacts in the same way. So pretending that every person has the same body movements when lying is dangerous. If faith is put in it by police canlead to guilty people getting crossed off the interest list and an innocent person can become the focus. The smiling thing isnt even true. People smile when theyre frustrated. Many athletes smile after making a mistake of some kind all the time. And then stupid people moan about how can they be happy about making a mistake.
Something weird I notice about your videos, as a new viewer. They seem to be overly sharp. there's some sort of shimmer effect on the pixels. It might be just your camera and you can't do anything about it. But, if you're using some sort of filter or special setting on the camera or software, you might want to look into this. I enjoy your work, BTW. It's always nice to find a skeptical TH-camr who didn't do a hard swerve to the right. (Though, sorry, you're not as fun as Captain Disillusion.)
You should watch some more of the full interrogations, especially the Canadian ones where using a polygraph and a 'lie detecting expert' is more common. There are at least a couple of them that I can think of where the person was found guilty based on that polygraph testimony but later exonerated with ironclad evidence.
As a footnote, its interesting that Canadian people think they have US legal rights and its common to see exactly that explained to people in Canadian police interviews. They don't have the right to have an attorney present during questioning and they don't have the right to any kind of persistent legal council, only the right to speak to duty council and I think then only once before interrogation. Moral is: Canada isnt as nice as people think it is.
Totally digging this channel, Rebecca. I too have been infected by these sorts of videos for the same reason you have (watching true crime videos in the mist of a depressive episode). Thanks for training your BS detector on slicksters like this.
I spent a pretty significant amount of time studying micro expressions. They're real. But require an upkeep of study and drill running to see effectively that I've since lost. And they're not magical lie detecting skills. They just show emotion. Someone could feel an emotion for any number of reasons at any given moment. Maybe they're having a shitty day and their emotions have nothing to do with whether or not they're telling you the truth. Its useful - it gives you more information to work with (that could be a red herring) but its far from perfect. I love poker. Micro expressions are useful in that context because its a closed setting. I Was broke and desperate. And planned on taking the last of my money casino and going for it. But then I landed an interview used a number of the tactics I'd learned to crush it. (Mesmerism is real too. Don't @ me) But now Im too tired and burnt out from said job to maintain that study. Theres a reason this shit is the domain of idle rich weirdos
30 seconds in. Yeah I feel you on that. Can't be healthy but hey these are things I feel I need to be able to identify. It's always good to know we aren't alone I suppose, most of the time at least.
What's that little black rectangle that appears briefly 8:22 - 8:24 to Watson's left (well, our left, looking at the screen; from her point of view, it would be on her right)? I'm genuinely curious; but I'd also be entertained by a decent conspiracy theory.
Interesting. I was curious about him and found you through a google search. In his latest video , Derek he claimed that a government agency uses his videos for training. He goes into how he got into it , kind of. He also kind of brushes over the “Skeptics” of body language. He clams skeptics “don’t believe in body language” which I think is the most broad term he could have used.
I'm good at it. Honestly body language isn't what it is. Lying about something takes a certain amount of self-deciet. Knowing what the detective will be looking for helps too.
The question might also be just WHY this is still promulgated; I suspect for the same reason that polygraph tests are still pushed to the populace as accurate means of getting to the truth--because it's to the advantage of those giving the tests.
The number to remember is 54. The research indicates that we are slightly better than chance at being able to differentiate between a truth and a lie -- 54%... importantly, that percentage is better for telling that a truth is a truth (61%) than telling that a lie is a lie (47% -- i.e., slightly below chance). Source: Bond & Depaulo (2006). Accuracy of deception judgments. DOI: 10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_2
The "evidence" of nonverbal cues to deception points out overwhelmingly that what people THINK is a cue to deception is, in fact, not diagnostic of deception. There are NO reliable non-verbal cues to deception. Most of the non-verbals that get mentioned are merely signals of nervousness or anxiety... The bad thing is that not only do lay people hold these beliefs, but so do the police -- they are explicitly TAUGHT this!!! And what innocent person would EVER be nervous being questioned by a cop?!?
10:48 the USA has largely abandoned trail by jury. Only 3% of prisoners had a trial. The rest were terrorised into a plea deal and went straight to jail. In America a prosecutor is a judge and jury so good to know it's done with body language.
Yes thanks for this- very informative piece of largely debunking this idea. However, does D.Brown not use some of these techniques during his live shows? I know he likes to downplay NLP but suspect it does play a role in his work. I will have to rewatch your video where you discuss him again. Great work you are doing.
I fell down a true crime tubehole recently as well...except worse cuz I've been listening to them to fall asleep. no nightmares yet... >_> you're not my therapist!
People with YT channels keep doing this to tear people apart and their fans in the comments will literally cosign their ridiculous claims as though fact just because they don't like the person being analyzed! But instead of just saying that, they say its "body language analysis" to make it not sound as personal even though it clearly is not based in science of any kind to an objective sign.
The only way body language experts can tell anything about anyone is if they're experts on a praticular individuals body language and have been able to study them and establish a baseline
I never studied body language but even me can spot that Lazar is lying. I'm 100% sure and I'm someone who almost always gives people the benefit of a doubt!
I saw some trucrime videos months ago and there was this case about a robbery amd they got the wrong guy, the description was a caucasian male and they got a black dude. The man was a dance teacher or something and the cops were telling him how they have video evidence and stuff and he was like _Great, show those videos I am not the guy you want_ The narrator was describing his body language as "someone who is clearly nervous after getting caught red handed... Or someone innocent completely frustrated at the situation" and that was the nail that told me: _Yep, this is bullsheet_
Well, kind of. However, to be fair, Van Schayk altso consider those things you mentioned at the end of your video. The details, what they have said before and all that. He does not consider only body language.
also fell down a YT hole recently about body language! and i feel like my therapist would also disapprove of me trying to find ways to prove to myself that everyone is lying and they do actually hate me :^) BUT that being said, here's a TEDTalk from a woman who is arguably a bit more qualified to analyze body language than Van Schaik : th-cam.com/video/lvxJoUuG018/w-d-xo.html
your videos are the best, i'm so glad i found your channel. and so thankful for your "fuck joe rogan" ethos. i feel the left as gone insane when they kiss his ass just cuse he smoked dmt a few times
Funny how the guy who is a body language "expert" failed to choose an image that didn't make him look like a douche. With a bit of luck someone will sue his ass off.
[L]ogic, in so far as it exhibits the universal and necessary laws of the understanding, must in these very laws present us with criteria of truth. Whatever contradicts these rules is false, because thereby the understanding is made to contradict its own universal laws of thought; that is, to contradict itself. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, I, 2nd Part, II. Of Transcendental Logic
I Love "Lie to me" ... think I Saw couple vids from you... pretty sure I havent seen any vids of The so called body language experts... I dont know any of The ppl you mentioned from that YT sphear. Didnt know that was a thing here so thats more of The usual YT experience. Most The Time if not alwsys I find out or see any of a bad thing present on TH-cam from other pół talking about it. If There's a "controversy" I only see ppl talk about it not The actually controversy. Toxic shit Head that needs to be avoided? Never see a vid from Those but ppl alarm how bad they are. Its pretty weird how I really dont find out about The mega popular shit youtube myself O_o
I think everyone has a “tell”. Yet their tells are unique to them. I know one person who stutters, another who scratches their head. My brother puts you at ease. He told me a lie about something, and I was there, yet it took me three days to realize that he lied to me. He had sprinkled the story with little words and phrases that made me feel he was trusting only me with this information. Like a con man. However you have to know a person very very well to recognize their tell. The same idea behind the lie detector baseline. (The sane lie detector that even its inventor said is pseudoscience.)
The name Bob Lazare comes up in one of Dr. Todd Grande's TH-cam videos, one which I'm not finding. No matter, it or rather he Dr. Grande agrees with you, Mr. Lazarre is a con man.
I get frustrated when people act like experts on this stuff. Since I'm Autistic, some of my mannerisms are considered lying even if I'm not
Exactly, the only thing this sort of stuff can detect outside of context and an established "baseline" of expression for a given individual (which takes time and multiple examples to ascertain) at best is neurosis or emotional conflict. The issue isn't even the "data", it's the interpretation of that data, or rather maybe in these cases involving highly complex human facial and verbal expressions it's impossible to disentangle the one the from the other.
Bro every “lying tell” I’ve ever seen are just autistic traits lmao
Bro I was just about to say! All these “lying tells” are just autistic traits and no one wants to admit it
It gets even worse.
An extremely disturbing fact is that many *_Police Officers_* - and especially *Police Detectives* - believe absolutely that they have a heightened ability to detect *_Lies_* & *_Guilt_* in suspects. When questioned by researchers, they base these skills in both:
• Personal Intuition from years of experience in dealing with criminals
( which can be indistinguishable from *Confirmation/Racial Bias* ).
• Intensive training in techniques which allow you to read a suspects *_Micro-Expressions_* / *_Body Language_* / *_Subconscious Emotions_* / etc.
( which are far often based in *_Pseudo-Scientific Woo_* , just like many of those *TH-cam* characters you've discussed in this video. )
If you're innocent of a crime, but get taken in by police for interrogation anyway, then your best option is to:
1 - *_Request a Lawyer_*
2 - *_Assert Your Right to Silence ( & STFU )_*
~ ~ ~
Check out this interesting report from *The Intercept:*
*_THE JUNK SCIENCE COPS USE TO DECIDE YOU’RE LYING_*
_Leaked documents detail law enforcement trainings in lie detection techniques that have been discredited by scientists._
tinyurl.com/y3jz8n63
thank you for this video. these "body language experts" fail to take a lot of circumstances into account - culture (american culture on the east coast insisting eye contact is a sign of respect, versus native communities that view eye contact as aggression; cultures and countries with different standards of personal space; small gestures that vary from place to place in meaning) neurodivergence or mental illness or trauma (all conditions in which eye contact induces anxiety, or in which fidgeting is a necessary form of self-soothing, or just in which expressions can lie outside the "norm") and upbringing (a combination of trauma, of the culture you are exposed to, of how people expect or demand you respond; the difference between training yourself to have a pokerface because showing emotion was punished some way versus never guarding your expression because open emotion was encouraged)
there's so many ways this pseudoscience is flawed and it has become something actively used to persecute people who fall outside of accepted norms for "honest body language"
I have a hard time with eye contact and always look left before and during speaking to people and I’ve had it pointed out to me that I do that “so I must be lying” so many times, especially when I was still in school. I do it when I’m talking for more than like one sentence because I don’t like holding eye contact for more than a few seconds at a time. But any time I tell someone a story or what I was doing over the weekend or whatever they’d be like “why are you looking away from me, you’re lying.” And it always made me super skeptical of people who say they can tell when someone’s lying.
Watson's Law: if you watch five videos on the same topic, within a week, youtube's algorithm will recommend you the stupidest video in existence on that topic.
It seems to kick in after way fewer than five.
@@Dorian_sapiensWe should definitely fine tune that number with some experiments. Show of hands who's willing to junk up their recommendations feed for science?
My estimation is that it takes two or three, and then the bulk of your Recommended will be that, with the dumbest one among them.
Hell, if you accidentally start some annoying video while trying to “ not interested” it, that seems to be all it takes.
Or... You can just do a Google search on that topic. Google will ALWAYS recommend the worse possible videos on that topic.
It’s easier to tell if someone is uncomfortable, than it is if they’re lying. But correlation doesn’t equal causation. And many truths are less comfortable than lies. And what is truth anyway?
Love this one. I'm a former military interrogator, over 2000 interrogations. I've taken the micro-facial expression course, and other body language courses, and they all boil down to watching for multiple deviations from an established baseline. They don't tell you a person is lying, but that a certain topic causes them stress.
Training on how to tell if someone is being deceitful (this is an important distinction) is a common part of the process for various people working in "law enforcement" or I suppose it would be more accurate to say it's part of the training for people who are involved in interrogation of some sort. Police, to TSA agent, lawyers, ect.
I never went through the training myself but I can remember how annoyingly smug my coworkers were after they went through the training and I know they even used to with their children. If it is in fact a psuedo science then it has a much further reach than you realize.
thank you so much for this. i’ve been very skeptical of these “body language readers” on youtube but i haven’t had the time to look into it too deeply
Want to pick out a liar? Point at anyone you please, because we all lie sometimes.
Want to identify a _particular_ lie? Find evidence to the contrary.
the series "lie to me" did a good job on two things: pointing out, that the polygraph is bogus and that torture is not just morally wrong but also not a good way to get information.
It's easy to tell if someone is lying: their nose grows when they lie! :)
No that's only people who were once wooden puppets.
I didn't realise this was a big genre on TH-cam until that viral "analysis" of Brie Larson where the voiceover is petty and snide as hell, but it confirms what everyone who wants to hate her thinks so it garnered a huge audience. In that interview, she was sat up very straight and a little stiff between Chris Hemsworth and Don Cheadle which was interpreted as her trying to be taller than Chris Hemsworth (lol) because she feels angry and insecure. Don Cheadle came out afterwards and said it was because the hair stylist kept having to rush out and fix her ponytail so she was trying to sit very still and not mess it up. It was also unfair to compare her lack of familiarity with the original avengers lineup as she's a latecomer and wasn't in many scenes with the others. I didn't even care for Captain Marvel that much, but people had such bad faith takes on every tiny thing she did after she was too openly feminist.
Hi. Also have severe depression! Fallen down the exact same hole XD. I actually went and did the research on body language and all the real experts laughed and said that while body language can give clues... Body language can also lie, or be sending more than one message, sometimes contradicting.
For example, many facial ticks and body movements associated with "lying" by these self appointed experts, are actually just associated with stress or excess energy. If these people tried to spot when I was lying, they'd have to say I never stopped lying because as well as depression, I have general anxiety that occasionally flares up into full agoraphobia, and an emotional regulation disorder. If I'm talking to others, I'm regulating stress, hiding emotions, carefully picking through my brain to carefully craft what I'll say next. Not lying, but carefully regulating everything so I don't become a social outcast
Being a social outcast ain't so bad. I personally find it liberating.
I have to also add: even inconsistencies within a persons retelling of what happened might not be a lie. It could be, but it could also just how the person perceived the event, which might be flawed.
IMHO, people telling falsehoods that they genuinely believe are true, should not be called liars. (And conversely, people telling truths they genuinely believe are false, should.)
I recognize that others may disagree with me here, but I wouldn't call Bob Lazar a liar if he believes his own crazy claims. ( @8:21 )
I think it's probably possible to tell whether someone's lying by looking at their body language, but that requires actually knowing and observing the person and how their body languages changes when they say things you know are untrue. I could well be wrong, though. And, further, not everyone knows they're lying when they "lie"- they could easily be mistaken, particularly with things like recalling things under hypnosis being popular enough that I know about them under my rock. There's also the faultiness of human memory at hand- we're not tape recorders, memories aren't actually recordings of an event as much as they are instructions for how to compose that event in your mind, and the brain rewrites over them every time we review a memory.
The same way you can tell on your friends. To know they are lying you need to know how they behave when they're not
Excellent video, Rebecca.
Around the time of Bill Clinton's "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is", Oprah had a body language expert on and was constantly trying to pin everything down to a simple "this movement means lying." Try as the guy might to explain that it was all a LOT more complicated than that, she just blithely ignored it all...
Remember Oprah brought the world Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil, both people who have actual medical degrees, but are nonetheless firm believers in pseudoscience.
5:19 I mean... people do it all the time. Usually the same type of people who do the remote lie detection crap. If I had 1 Euro for every drama channel that regularly diagnoses the subjects of their videos with Antisocial Personality Disorder, PMS or Autism I could buy the stock to start my own pyramid scheme.
Great video!
This video is an example of betteridge's law. Every headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with a no.
I’m gonna go with “n o p e”
“That’s gonna get a YIKES from me” - Eddy Burback
Yeah, I watched that video and I couldn't complete it. When he said that Lazar predicted element 115, I was screaming at the monitor. Lazar said that it would be very stable; Instead, its half-life is 2 seconds. So if he took out 200 pounds of element 115, he would be dead from all the radiation. He also suggested that it would create anti-mater if you hit it with a particle beam and that it could manipulate gravity through the strong force. Of course, none of that is true.
Every time I hear "body language" I think about Ursula from The Little Mermaid.
Alex Z
Same
What?! The almost hour of darkness wasn't a cheeky plan to get more view time?!
I feel lied to!
A few of those body language frauds showed up in my recommendations today (not on this video), and I've _never_ watched anything remotely related. I blame Rebecca for priming the algorithm.
It's been a while since I've read about this, but it seems worth mentioning given the topic of the video. An expert in face-processing turned me onto the fact that Ekman's work on the 6 basic expressions has actually been seriously called into doubt in the face and emotion processing world. Many of his cross-cultural studies were done with shoddy and circular methods, that have failed to replicate with modern attempts. Further, I've been told he used his position on journal review boards to suppress publication of research that contradicted his work, while actively monetizing his own research. This is all a long way of saying, his work on micro-expressions has always struck me as a bit pseudo-scientific given its source, also he is apparently unwilling to submit his current work to peer-review... for reasons...
I wish I could remember the specific papers on the issues with the original cross cultural studies, but for the life of me I can't remember their names. Sadly, given how much the universal thesis was marketed and how mainstream it went, I think it may be a while before the issues with this work become widely known outside of the face-processing community.
I'm sorry, its too late at night for me to hunt for the original papers I read, and this is buried in youtube comments so I barley expect this to be read by anyone, but here's some stuff:
Ironically popsci has a good discussion of how this pop-science is misleading:
www.popsci.com/article/science/facial-expressions-arent-universal-we-thought/
This seems to be a comprehensive journal article that partly deals with these criticisms:
journals.sagepub.com/eprint/SAUES8UM69EN8TSMUGF9/full
There was in a kid I went to high school with who claimed to be able to do this because of his ninja training. No one believed him in the late 00's and no one would believe them now.
Did you go to school with Dermott from The Venture Brothers??
Oh that shade thrown at joe rogan lmao, my brother never shuts up about that guy
He's got that intersection of "bro" and "intellectual" down to a T, drawing large audiences because of it.
I have a friend who watches him religiously (!) and thinks everything he says is gold. Of course, my friend also thinks Elon Musk is a supreme genius who only wants to help humanity.
JD on scrubs would turn his head when he was daydreaming. #scrubs
i'm autistic and these kinds of ideas are hilarious to me. my body language is gibberish.
I like how you left the unspoken fact that many 'liars' are simply delusional(or that some think they're telling the truth for other reasons) as an example of one of the many ways that even if this type of thing were reliable 'generally' that it still wouldn't hold up in real world situations.
These things fall flat on their face the moment you try and apply any of these practices to someone who is autistic. Since all autistic body language and microexpressions are completely differently hardwired to those of neurotypical folks.
It's why communication among either group of people is highly effective, but between members of the two different groups is highly impeded, as studies keep confirming: dart.ed.ac.uk/research/nd-iq/
It leads to serious problems when cops assume someone is lying just because they're autistic.
Hilarious. He literally believes a scam artist but every time a Black person is up for review they are ALWAYS labeled a liar. No matter which channel I see it on that is what happens. Havent seen not a one labeled as honest.
As a theatre director who doesn’t use words like “feeling” or “emotion” with actors (and has trouble physically expressing my emotions), I focus on helping actors create “containers” that give the appearance of what the scene calls for. (If you’re doing a show 8 days a week for a year or more, you’re never going to be able to “be sad” reliably every time. So don’t even try.)
Which really means focusing on using the body and voice to create believable actions, behaviors, etc that an actor can do over and over and over again. (Then they don’t have to worry about “being sad” or any of that sometimes incredibly harmful emotional recall nonsense.)
I have pulled from this work to help create some of that. In doing so, you also begin to notice micro expressions that indicate when an actor is really “in” a scene or checked out (like thinking about what they’re going to do after rehearsal.)
And helping actors notice their micro expressions, they can create more believable performances. (And you can see micro expressions and/or lack thereof when watching actors on TV that sometimes really take you out of it.)
What’s interesting, as a director, is that some of these I was already doing unconsciously, but didn’t have the words pinpoint and express to the actors what I was experiencing. Pulling from this work added something concrete to be able to articulate to the actors. (Of course it’s just one of many tools in my toolbox.)
This isn’t to validate or defend the scientific claims or use as lie detection, just to show an application that is actually useful.
Paul Ekman is at the very top of all those liars. In fact, the difference between laymen and trained professional in observing lies is very little. Ekman's "95% school" is nothing else than a cash cow. And those youtubers & co are rubbish, so as most of other lie-detection experts, mean those stressing nonverbal signs of behavior. It's still about searching facts, contextual analysis etc.
When it comes to micro-expressions, there are simply too many permutations for someone to consciously and reliably interpret if someone is lying. Any isolated handful of micro-expressions will likely be taken out of context and this is especially true when the "reader" is making indirect observations by watching a dang TH-cam video of the target.
Chronic liars don't believe they're lying, so interpreting micro-expressions are no good on them, and other types of liars will likely give themselves away from a host of other (non-micro-expression) tells that anyone with reasonably mature social skills can see through (i.e. hemming and hawing, speaking too fast, too many inconsistencies, back tracking, quick to anger or counter accuse, high levels of defensiveness, avoidance or misdirection, etc).
I've seen a video in which a person claimed that a person that accused someone of sexual assault is lying because their body language would show that they are not traumatized...
You can't make that shit up.
Can confirm that Watson's Law has been observed by me, too.
The only thing I'd say is you categorically cannot tell if someone is lying just because it isn't possible under the laws of physics or we know isn't true. Like you would not call a child a liar because they believe in Santa or the tooth fairy as far as they know they exist, it is not a lie if they think that they exist, they are not trying to deceive you.
_It's extremely not helpful but YOU'RE NOT MY THERAPIST!_
And with that, Ms. Watson, you have made the meme of the month.
*Edit:* Formatting
Oooh! In relation to this you should do a video on how the TSA is using the same pseudo science through their behavioral analysis officers to detain travelers without a warrant.
These videos are a serious guilty pleasure of mine. I call them MulderTube. I enjoy the escapism of imagining it's true.
"Watson's Law" has a nice ring to it. Let's make this happen!
Even trained individuals are terrible at telling if people are lying. Just as a therapist or psychiatrist. It’d make those jobs way easier if they could.
ur opening sentence here is all too relatable
Oh, you want to check out interrogation reviews then. The narrators believe in magical pantomimes. He touched his shoe that means his mother didn't love him.
th-cam.com/video/w9SBNkZ3qoM/w-d-xo.html
kurtf1 haha I love JCS
I dunno, JCS seems to mainly focus on technique. I can only recall one or two times they've delved into this kind of BS.
@@gsmontag either way I like watching the interrogation videos themselves, another channel without commentary had one of a county sheriff being questioned over misuse of resources (fudging time sheets and the like) there's some real morbid fascination with seeing someone caught try to back pedal and dodge their way out of it
Defiantly not. Sure there are some things that a larger percentage of the population may have in common when lying. But people are unique. Not everyone reacts in the same way. So pretending that every person has the same body movements when lying is dangerous. If faith is put in it by police canlead to guilty people getting crossed off the interest list and an innocent person can become the focus.
The smiling thing isnt even true. People smile when theyre frustrated. Many athletes smile after making a mistake of some kind all the time. And then stupid people moan about how can they be happy about making a mistake.
"Can Body Language Experts Tell When People are Lying?" No. Next question?
I think "The mediocre who think are smarter Than they are" is The problem
Something weird I notice about your videos, as a new viewer.
They seem to be overly sharp. there's some sort of shimmer effect on the pixels.
It might be just your camera and you can't do anything about it. But, if you're using some sort of filter or special setting on the camera or software, you might want to look into this.
I enjoy your work, BTW. It's always nice to find a skeptical TH-camr who didn't do a hard swerve to the right. (Though, sorry, you're not as fun as Captain Disillusion.)
You should watch some more of the full interrogations, especially the Canadian ones where using a polygraph and a 'lie detecting expert' is more common. There are at least a couple of them that I can think of where the person was found guilty based on that polygraph testimony but later exonerated with ironclad evidence.
As a footnote, its interesting that Canadian people think they have US legal rights and its common to see exactly that explained to people in Canadian police interviews. They don't have the right to have an attorney present during questioning and they don't have the right to any kind of persistent legal council, only the right to speak to duty council and I think then only once before interrogation. Moral is: Canada isnt as nice as people think it is.
WATSON’S LAW. Yes.
Totally digging this channel, Rebecca. I too have been infected by these sorts of videos for the same reason you have (watching true crime videos in the mist of a depressive episode). Thanks for training your BS detector on slicksters like this.
I spent a pretty significant amount of time studying micro expressions.
They're real. But require an upkeep of study and drill running to see effectively that I've since lost.
And they're not magical lie detecting skills.
They just show emotion. Someone could feel an emotion for any number of reasons at any given moment. Maybe they're having a shitty day and their emotions have nothing to do with whether or not they're telling you the truth. Its useful - it gives you more information to work with (that could be a red herring) but its far from perfect.
I love poker. Micro expressions are useful in that context because its a closed setting.
I Was broke and desperate. And planned on taking the last of my money casino and going for it.
But then I landed an interview used a number of the tactics I'd learned to crush it. (Mesmerism is real too. Don't @ me)
But now Im too tired and burnt out from said job to maintain that study.
Theres a reason this shit is the domain of idle rich weirdos
30 seconds in. Yeah I feel you on that. Can't be healthy but hey these are things I feel I need to be able to identify. It's always good to know we aren't alone I suppose, most of the time at least.
Keep it up, you're doing a good job.
Love your channel rebecca. Great video!!
What's that little black rectangle that appears briefly 8:22 - 8:24 to Watson's left (well, our left, looking at the screen; from her point of view, it would be on her right)? I'm genuinely curious; but I'd also be entertained by a decent conspiracy theory.
I preferred the extended cut.
Interesting. I was curious about him and found you through a google search.
In his latest video , Derek he claimed that a government agency uses his videos for training.
He goes into how he got into it , kind of.
He also kind of brushes over the “Skeptics” of body language.
He clams skeptics “don’t believe in body language” which I think is the most broad term he could have used.
I'm good at it. Honestly body language isn't what it is. Lying about something takes a certain amount of self-deciet. Knowing what the detective will be looking for helps too.
But what about the hour of darkness? Everyone will miss all the fun!
Haven't we had enough hours of darkness in the last three years? The darkest, many people are saying.
The question might also be just WHY this is still promulgated; I suspect for the same reason that polygraph tests are still pushed to the populace as accurate means of getting to the truth--because it's to the advantage of those giving the tests.
I've experienced "Watson's law" before.
The number to remember is 54. The research indicates that we are slightly better than chance at being able to differentiate between a truth and a lie -- 54%... importantly, that percentage is better for telling that a truth is a truth (61%) than telling that a lie is a lie (47% -- i.e., slightly below chance).
Source: Bond & Depaulo (2006). Accuracy of deception judgments. DOI: 10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_2
The "evidence" of nonverbal cues to deception points out overwhelmingly that what people THINK is a cue to deception is, in fact, not diagnostic of deception. There are NO reliable non-verbal cues to deception. Most of the non-verbals that get mentioned are merely signals of nervousness or anxiety... The bad thing is that not only do lay people hold these beliefs, but so do the police -- they are explicitly TAUGHT this!!! And what innocent person would EVER be nervous being questioned by a cop?!?
Heck yeah. Good topic, bro.
10:48 the USA has largely abandoned trail by jury. Only 3% of prisoners had a trial. The rest were terrorised into a plea deal and went straight to jail. In America a prosecutor is a judge and jury so good to know it's done with body language.
Rebecca, I see you glance to your right. What's over there?
Yes thanks for this- very informative piece of largely debunking this idea. However, does D.Brown not use some of these techniques during his live shows? I know he likes to downplay NLP but suspect it does play a role in his work. I will have to rewatch your video where you discuss him again. Great work you are doing.
Tim Roth in anything would be good tho
That intro felt like a personal attack.
Thank you
I fell down a true crime tubehole recently as well...except worse cuz I've been listening to them to fall asleep. no nightmares yet... >_>
you're not my therapist!
I know, that PooTube algorithm recommends scishow space vids after I watch five pbs space time vids in a row. How rude.
I wish i was recommended scishow before 😱
Whoops I've been diagnosing lots of people with jaundice.
People with YT channels keep doing this to tear people apart and their fans in the comments will literally cosign their ridiculous claims as though fact just because they don't like the person being analyzed! But instead of just saying that, they say its "body language analysis" to make it not sound as personal even though it clearly is not based in science of any kind to an objective sign.
Should look into a person called "Eyes for Lies." Know about her who tried to argue that people are lying through their eyes including Amanda Knox.
The only way body language experts can tell anything about anyone is if they're experts on a praticular individuals body language and have been able to study them and establish a baseline
You always have to wash your hands before and after surfing the net. Always maintain that internet habit.
reminds me of Jim Curry in 'Ace Ventura'...
Do a video on Bob Lazar. Whatever one may make of him, it's a fascinating rabbit hole.
Omg I just fell down the same TH-cam hole
me too lol
but I call them tubeholes
I wonder if people that are really strong at code switching are better at reading micro expressions and telling if someone is lying?
Uh-oh, you denigrated Joe Rogan! His faithful worshippers are going to get mad!
Girl, you are great!
I never studied body language but even me can spot that Lazar is lying. I'm 100% sure and I'm someone who almost always gives people the benefit of a doubt!
I saw some trucrime videos months ago and there was this case about a robbery amd they got the wrong guy, the description was a caucasian male and they got a black dude. The man was a dance teacher or something and the cops were telling him how they have video evidence and stuff and he was like _Great, show those videos I am not the guy you want_
The narrator was describing his body language as "someone who is clearly nervous after getting caught red handed... Or someone innocent completely frustrated at the situation" and that was the nail that told me: _Yep, this is bullsheet_
I miss Quiz-o-Tron :'(
Well, kind of. However, to be fair, Van Schayk altso consider those things you mentioned at the end of your video. The details, what they have said before and all that.
He does not consider only body language.
I'm just going to recommend Stephanie Harlowe for true crime again. She's not super-graphic.
also fell down a YT hole recently about body language! and i feel like my therapist would also disapprove of me trying to find ways to prove to myself that everyone is lying and they do actually hate me :^) BUT that being said, here's a TEDTalk from a woman who is arguably a bit more qualified to analyze body language than Van Schaik :
th-cam.com/video/lvxJoUuG018/w-d-xo.html
your videos are the best, i'm so glad i found your channel. and so thankful for your "fuck joe rogan" ethos. i feel the left as gone insane when they kiss his ass just cuse he smoked dmt a few times
Funny how the guy who is a body language "expert" failed to choose an image that didn't make him look like a douche. With a bit of luck someone will sue his ass off.
8:38 I personally don’t think we can plausibly deny the existence of aliens, but I’ve always been skeptical of Lazar’s story since I first heard it
Can you link those true crime videos? Sounds something like I'd like.
press x to doubt
That's funny because that's how I happened on you're channel
[L]ogic, in so far as it exhibits the universal and necessary laws of the understanding, must in these very laws present us with criteria of truth. Whatever contradicts these rules is false, because thereby the understanding is made to contradict its own universal laws of thought; that is, to contradict itself.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, I, 2nd Part, II. Of Transcendental Logic
I Love "Lie to me" ... think I Saw couple vids from you... pretty sure I havent seen any vids of The so called body language experts... I dont know any of The ppl you mentioned from that YT sphear. Didnt know that was a thing here so thats more of The usual YT experience.
Most The Time if not alwsys I find out or see any of a bad thing present on TH-cam from other pół talking about it. If There's a "controversy" I only see ppl talk about it not The actually controversy. Toxic shit Head that needs to be avoided? Never see a vid from Those but ppl alarm how bad they are. Its pretty weird how I really dont find out about The mega popular shit youtube myself O_o
that sass...
...no
I think everyone has a “tell”. Yet their tells are unique to them. I know one person who stutters, another who scratches their head. My brother puts you at ease. He told me a lie about something, and I was there, yet it took me three days to realize that he lied to me. He had sprinkled the story with little words and phrases that made me feel he was trusting only me with this information. Like a con man. However you have to know a person very very well to recognize their tell. The same idea behind the lie detector baseline. (The sane lie detector that even its inventor said is pseudoscience.)
The name Bob Lazare comes up in one of Dr. Todd Grande's TH-cam videos, one which I'm not finding. No matter, it or rather he Dr. Grande agrees with you, Mr. Lazarre is a con man.