Deception

Alright, I will bite.

How come, on your theory, when the financial stakes are high people cannot spot a Madoff or Stanford or Ponzi?

People believe lies because they want to. People who are not very accurate often see the same clues as expert lie detectors, but someone looks like their brother and therefore they won't (can't?) believe they could lie. I think most of our failure to detect lies comes from our wanting to believe the lies we are told.

The high stakes are necessary in designing experiments to make sure that their actually are clues to deception - either verbal or nonverbal. With Madoff and the like, they had lied so many times, and were successful for so long, that there were probably very few behavioral clues to deceit. The clues were in the inordinately high returns - which greed would have the investors overlook.

So you are suggesting that experience trumps any facial expressions or behavioral cues to deception and you and Ekman cannot come up with experiments that test 'experienced' liars. Even a 'wizard' could not detect Madoff and others. So your own experiments do not really test experienced liars--just liars who are not experienced, even under your so-called high stakes experiments.

Dear Maureen, I wonder if you have any comments regarding the article in J Nonverb Behav as regards the influence of emotional / unemotional cues? Whilst I dont think £10 [$15] could be considered high stakes in their study, do you think that liars who get caught have a higher "emotional load" [my terms] before they get interviewed? Considering the availability now of live feeds into politics, I find it interesting that people who are later "outed" seem in retrospective to have stronger emotional ties to potential embaressments [e.g. oil, loss of Stinger missles during the 80's after training AlQaeda operatives off the coast of Scotland]!?!?