One thing's certain. The U.S. Government wasted billions of taxpayer money training TSA agents--often recruited from ads on pizza boxes--in useless behavior analysis techniques.
If you view TSA not as an organization designed to prevent attacks, but rather as an employment (employes people who would be flipping burgers instead) and contracting agency (provides billions of dollars for security companies who design "behavioral techniques" or make machines called "Rapiscan") then you see as a very successful agency.
> According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin. Oh the irony surrounding statistics and how often it is used to lie - case in point: the mode is completely absent and some useless factoid is presented instead. That's not to say that argument is false ("you can't use body language"); merely that because…
Without knowing the experiment details (number of trials, ratio of people laying vs telling the truth) we don't know if 50 is actually significant. What's the curve of success for participants assuming random guessing (in line with the proportion of liars)? Is 50 to be expected? My first thought is that with 20,000 participants, sheer chance will give you a handful of outliers, and 50 at 80% accuracy doesn't sound ve…
By my math, if each participant faced 25 trials, and each participant has a 50% chance of success on each trial, then you'd expect 40 people to get a score of 20+ (80%) just due to chance. To give an idea.
This seems to me like the technique that is already employed by Israeli airport security agents. They have a normally-flowing inquisitive conversation with every passenger boarding flights to or from the country, and they are very good at detecting when the details don't add up or when the person is acting too uncomfortable.
I do wonder, and this is a serious question. Why would someone trying to be deceitful because they have something very serious to hide even take the chance on speaking with a security agent? I'm not suggesting they "plead the fifth," but rather carry a card explaining that they are mute. Doctors papers are easy to forge. If the incident leading to the condition happened recently, then that would be an excuse for not…
I expect that that sort of situation is rare enough that the officers would simply play it safe and treat the person as suspicious. So it would probably be counter-productive if you were actually trying to hide something.
> Ironically, liars turn out to be better lie detectors. What is ironic about that? If I understand how to lie to other humans, why is it anything but expected that I would be able to recognize that skill in other people?
Also 'crazy' people were more apt at recognizing other people with mental problems that the doctors
Flying to UK from where? When flying to the UK from Europe or USA nobody has ever asked me about the address where I would be spending the first night. USA does ask that.
Every time I've flown to the UK from the USA, the entry card has asked for an address in England. The first time (in 2005) I left it blank and they wouldn't let me pass immigration until I filled it out.
I got in to England without listing my friend's address, but the border guard seemed extremely suspicious and really grilled me about my travel plans, etc.
This seems to me like the technique that is already employed by Israeli airport security agents. They have a normally-flowing inquisitive conversation with every passenger boarding flights to or from the country, and they are very good at detecting when the details don't add up or when the person is acting too uncomfortable.
> they are very good at detecting ...
How do you know how good they are? That seems like the point of the article.
There are ways to work around this. The key is to not lie, but to tell a different truth. I used to do this in high school, when my parents were grilling me. Friday night: go out with quiet friends. Saturday AM questioning: "How was your evening?" "Fine". "OK". Saturday night, go out with less quiet friends. :) The Sunday AM questioning was rather more rigorous. So I described what I did Friday. There were telling he…
Wait until you are a parent and see if you are so easily fooled. Then ask your parents how much they really knew.
I read "What every body is saying" by Joe Navarro, an ex. FBI agent a few years back, and one of things it spent a lot of time on was tearing apart the notion that we can recognise liars by body language without knowing them well first. People do have "tells", but as the article says, they vary wildly from person to person. They're still interesting to look out for, though, as they're helpful hints to let you direct…
I think poker is another area where people think that the ability to identify "tells" or read people's body language is what matters most, but are mistaken. When really you are rarely going to have played enough with a person to identify a tell, know what an identified tell implies (lie or truth) exactly, or experience an identified tell and its truth value in a spot where it would have changed the outcome.
I believe you are quite wrong. Tells are real and they work, although they do differ from person to person, and expert opponents might deliberately give deceitful tells. Source: used to play a lot of live poker.
I do wonder, and this is a serious question. Why would someone trying to be deceitful because they have something very serious to hide even take the chance on speaking with a security agent? I'm not suggesting they "plead the fifth," but rather carry a card explaining that they are mute. Doctors papers are easy to forge. If the incident leading to the condition happened recently, then that would be an excuse for not…
I think questions at a border don't really fall under the fifth, as you're submitting to them voluntarily because you want to get in the country. You can refuse to answer any question, of course, but then the border agents can refuse to let you into the country. I'm not sure if the goal is solely to stop "truly bad guys" who want to bring down a plane from getting on it, but rather make a note of anyone who might be…
This seems to me like the technique that is already employed by Israeli airport security agents. They have a normally-flowing inquisitive conversation with every passenger boarding flights to or from the country, and they are very good at detecting when the details don't add up or when the person is acting too uncomfortable.