There are conflicting reports as to whether you can really spot a liar, but scientists in Canada believe they’ve cracked the case thanks to tiny involuntary face movements.
Fans of the hit TV show Lie to Me will be familiar with the idea of looking at someone’s facial muscles to see if they’re lying or not. However, there are a lot of conflicting reports out there on the interweb claiming that it’s simply impossible to tell if someone is lying as anyone who is a half decent actor could pull one off seamlessly.
That’s not exactly true according to researchers from the University of British Columbia, in Canada, who discovered that liars were caught out by tiny involuntary movements that caused them to raise their eyebrows and smile slightly.
They also found that someone telling the truth was likely to furrow their brow in genuine “expressions of distress”, reports the Daily Telegraph. According to psychologists, the majority of humans can easily control their lower face muscles in order to talk and eat, but those in the upper face and around the eyebrows are much more difficult to manipulate as they tend to have a mind of their own.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, head researcher Dr Leanne Brinke said, “Our research suggests that muscles of the face are not under complete conscious control and certain muscles are likely to betray the liar, particularly in high-stakes and highly emotional situations”.
These conclusions were made after the researchers looked at more than 23,000 video frames from 52 high profile missing persons cases where a family member or friend made a public plea for the safe return of whoever was missing.
It turned out that half of the 52 people who made a public plea were lying and they were in fact involved with the person’s disappearance in some form.
So the next time you’re heading down to the boozer with the lads and you tell the wife you’re heading out to clean oil off of baby seals, you’d want to be careful your upper face doesn’t give you away.
