Hacker Cinema
Lie to Me
2009 · TV series · 44 min episodes · 3 seasons
Created by Sam Baum
The world's leading deception researcher, Dr. Cal Lightman, studies facial expression, body language and tone of voice to determine when a person is lying and why, which helps law enforcement and government agencies uncover the truth. But his skills also make it easier for him to deceive others.
8 positive7 neutralfrom 15 commenters
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15 comments on Hacker News
I have believed that to be the case for a while. It's perfectly logical, from a species point of view.
I also think that we are hardwired not to be able to believe our own lies, because of this. There is (99.9% of the time) a tell, for humans. For someone to effectively lie to us, we need to want to believe the lie, otherwise it fails.
The TV show "Lie to me" is therefore a fascinating exploration (a bit exaggerated in its effectiveness) of how to detect and point out such tells.
I thought this was true most of my life...until someone suggested to me that I had Asperger's.
Upon deeper investigation, I found out (to my great surprise) that most people's experience of communication is different from mine in a profound way. They really are taking most of their cues about meaning from things other than my actual words, and they were trying to communicate a great many things to me without words that I was missing completely.
I (obviously) don't know you from anyone, but if this claim has seemed as transparently false to you as it did to me, I'd just encourage you to try to keep your mind open to the possibility that your experience is anomalous.
The good news is that once I knew this was true, I was able to focus on trying to learn to compensate. It's almost like people are speaking two languages at once, whatever they're saying out loud, and then another whole set of things in a kind of full body sign language that most of them picked up intuitively from earliest childhood and use constantly without even being aware they're doing it.
All languages are learnable if you're determined, so once you know to look for them, you can start.
If you want to come at it from a formal angle (which might be necessary), check out the old TV show "Lie to Me." It touches on the science of interpreting body expressions and facial cues. I think it'll help you see some of what I mean.
Your comment reads the same way to me that I suppose vaccine misinformation, Russian propaganda, or QAnon conspiracies must sound to you.
Yes, the videos are amateur and I highly doubt the guy is credentialed in psychology. But they are not in any way similar to the calculated disinformation campaigns you offer as comparison.
They're entertaining. They're fun to watch. They're not being used as police training videos. If they're influencing jurors, I don't see how this is any different than the thousands of unconscious (or conscious) biases already inherent in the justice system.
By this logic we should ban all true-crime shows and law enforcement dramas because they might contain "misinformation". The show Lie to Me comes to mind as an example of similar pseudo-psychology in entertainment. I'd recommend giving it a watch if you've never seen it, Tim Roth is great.
Since when is random, blatant censorship hailed as "obvious good"? What timeline is this?
> “It’s very difficult to label the underlying emotion,” he said, since external expression and internal feeling don’t always correlate well.
Not true. Paul Ekman spent most of his professional life studying micro expression and he developed pretty accurate system for recognising emotions leaking though micro expressions. The science presented in the TV series "Lie to me" was largely based on his work. https://www.paulekman.com/
There's plenty of science behind micro-expressions and detection of deception.
Paul Ekman [0] is "ranked 59th out of the 100 most cited psychologists of the twentieth century" and I thought the TV show based on his research [1] was very entertaining. (I am surprised that the article used the phrase "micro-expression" without any reference to Ekman's work.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me
By grinning like an idiot I was classified as a very happy 33 year old female. I'm a 25 year old male.
I tried variations of the standard expressions and pulled off sad, disgust, anger quite easily.
I knew binge watching Lie To Me before my psychology mid would come handy at some point!
I hoped for samples of each smile. I had a guilty pleasure in watching a short lived fictitious TV series called "Lie to me" which focused on reading faces.
Disclosure: At the last minute I escaped a terrorist attack in Israel when I purchased a candy bar at a local store. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Jerusalem_vehicular_attack)
Dr. Paul Ekman is a worthy researcher, who studied facial expressions and has worked with the Dali Lama. The TV series, Lie to Me (now on Netflix) is wonderful and fun.
I was at Columbia University when the World Trade Center was struck. I used to work in a building across the street from the WTC. I could see the smoke down Broadway (Ave) from the WTC. Now there is a memorial (and an Apple Store will soon be on the site).
So, if torture would have prevented 9/11 should we have done the torture or should we have let 9/11 happen?
To me it is simple. Every single life is important. Ekman argues that while torture may prevent some terrorism it is not perfect. But, no intervention is perfect. Because surgery is not 100% in saving a life from a traffic accident, does that mean we don't do the surgery?
Instead of writing a blog post about torturing to save lives from terrorism, Dr. Ekman should visit with loved ones of victims of 9/11, and of terrorist attacks in Israel, France, ..... After speaking with 9/11 loved ones of victims, he could visit the loved ones of about a dozen teenage girls that were killed waiting in line to go dancing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphinarium_discotheque_massacre
Empathy is really important. I'm surprised at this blog post.
In the 3-season TV show Lie to Me (IMDB: 8.0), the protagonist relies on "micro-expressions" to catch criminals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me
> One of us suggested that the film include the full array of emotions now studied in science, but Mr. Docter rejected this idea for the simple reason that the story could handle only five or six characters.
What is the full array of emotions? Having seen "Lie to Me" I know about the emotions expressed by microexpressions, but I do not know if there are more. "Joy" is not on that list. Either it is no emotion in the scientific world or expressed differently. Any good links?
I've worked on similar systems as described in this article. If you ever watched "Lie To Me", the Fox TV show, that show is based on a real person and one of my long term business partners is a real life R&D firm working with the real life person "Lie to Me" is based. We have neural nets that "correct poor quality images" of a person, identify their emotional state, and can do so much more that is too scary to relate without violating trusts.
The biggest customers for the system are casinos and the interstate highway patrol. After that is organizations the help find missing children.
Reminds me of the TV series Lie To Me (03x13) called "Killer App" where the Zuckerberg character's social network uses cell phone camera technology to point one's phone at anyone's face in order to get their profile info.
Also reminded me a bit of the iris scanners in Leon, Mexico http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/26/iris-scanning-set-to-secure-city-in-mexico-then-the-world-video/
I like them because I can decide I like a show like The Office or Lie To Me, and I can watch all episodes, even new ones the day they come out.
This is not true of Netflix or many TV websites.
What is this, an episode of Lie To Me? :-)
Government spies in the Shanghai office stealing Google's source tree seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back. I guess China will just build their own Google now...
Ouch. $2 an episode would be harsh for me.
Our cable bill is like, $80 and that includes internet. So maybe $40 of that is for TV.
And I watch a bunch of different shows. CSI x 3, Law and Order, Bones, House, NCIS, Fringe, The Mentalist, Psych, Criminal Minds, Numbers, Law and Order, Lie to Me.
At $2 a show, per week, that'd set me back.. about $110 a month!
Far more than I pay for cable right now.