Louette McInnes found a talk by Richard Wiseman at Canterbury University well worth braving the winter cold for. Professor Wiseman holds the Chair of Public Understanding of Psychology at Hertfordshire University.

Getting up and out on a cold Sunday morning for a ‘lecture’ barely seemed worth the effort, but several hot cups of coffee later, the idea didn’t look quite so unappealing. Thinking I was now alert and able to function and observe the world, I was amazed, amused, and horrified at how easily Prof Wiseman destroyed this illusion. He very entertainingly showed how easy it is to misdirect people, lie to them, or have even normally good observers (of which I thought I was one!) miss important details. He then went on to examine, via a BBC study, how well the general public can tell if a person is lying.

By way of introduction, Prof Wiseman explained that he got interested in the area because he had started out as a magician trying to capitalise on missed perceptions and misdirected observations, something magicians become adept at doing. I’m going to give a bit of detail on some of his tricks because as a Skeptic I could see myself using some of them with a class at some stage, and because it shows just how were are fooled or fool ourselves.

As his first example (or magic trick), he said he would flash up on the OHP five playing cards, then flash them up again but without the one most people in the audience had mentally chosen. Of course, whichever card you chose wasn’t there! A few people objected that something had changed-and he admitted, yes, he’d actually changed all the cards so none of the originals were present-but he had replaced cards with a different suit, so most people, concentrating on their chosen card, hadn’t noticed the switch.

We were treated to an audio of the song Stairway to Heaven, which apparently some people claim is a demonic song if played in reverse (who would ever bother to do that?!). A few people, afterward, had thought they heard the phrase “sad Satan”. However, when this was pointed out and a copy of the words put onscreen to ‘help’, the alternate reverse Satan version seemed far more apparent-but only as long as the words were up on the screen. We were tending to ‘hear’ what we thought was there-the brain picking out the sounds to fit the words.

For his next, and most amazing, demonstration of misdirection, Wiseman said he would show us a video to compare the observational ability of males versus females. Each group was to observe some people passing a basketball around. We were to concentrate on the players in white shirts and count their passes. “Ignore any passes by the players in the black shirts,” was the strict instruction. I was sure I could manage to concentrate to do this. After the short video, the Prof asked “Who counted 14 passes?”

My husband and I were still debating our count and several people yelled out 12 or 13. Then he asked “Who saw the gorilla?” In a stunned audience of about 150 people, only about eight raised their hands. A replay then showed, walking amongst the black and white-shirted players, someone in a gorilla suit who weaved around the players, paused, beat its chest, and exited stage right! Intense concentration on the white shirts in the scene meant we had missed a major item. I consoled myself with the fact that a group of Nobel Laureates in London, who presumably are top notch observers with a high concentration ability did no better than I did.

What a good lesson in science. This brought to mind a case from geology of trying to predict when a volcano is about to erupt. The most obvious signal seemed to be the small, sharp, short quakes preceding an eruption. But no one had been able to find the pattern (count the passes of the ball).

One person, however, looked behind the many small, sharp quakes to the less obvious/visible long period events, and these eventually proved much more useful in prediction. Yet no one else had seen what was right in front of them because they were concentrating on only part of the picture…

Wiseman then moved into magician mode and explained how mis-direction is used in a trick called the French Coin Drop. He pointed out that it took him two weeks of intensive practice as a young magician to master the trick and learn to carry out the misdirection. In the trick, a coin held up in the left hand appears to be passed to the right hand, where it disappears only to reappear in the left hand. Simple, it seemed, but much sneakier and more subtle in psychology and mis-direction than it sounds. The trick works because the coin is just dropped from between the thumb and forefinger of the left hand into the palm as the right hand passes over but doesn’t take it. The real trick is that the left hand is held still while the right hand moves to draw the eye to it. At the same time, the magician must move his head and eye as if to follow the coin. (He said that was the hardest part to do as a young apprentice magician.) Try it yourself! He repeated the trick several times, showing that the trick just didn’t work nearly as well if he moved the left hand away instead of the right, or if he failed to move his head and eyes to follow the right hand.

The next trick depends on our assumption that people aren’t out to trick us by being dishonest, and aren’t able to tell a lie, or at least not tell the whole truth, with a straight face. A member of the audience was asked to pick one of three cards – yellow, green, or orange (but you could use more). We were told Prof Wiseman had already predicted her answer. He then turned on the OHP to show the word ‘orange’, which had been her choice. Magic?

As R Heinlein said, “one man’s technology is another man’s magic.” In this case, technology had little to do with it-Wiseman then pointed out that he had, also, an envelope already on the table with the word ‘yellow’ inside as well as a slip of paper in his pocket with the word ‘green’ printed on it.

People apparently can lie more easily, and at a younger age, than most people realise. He quoted several studies, including one on very young children. Left in a room with a toy they are told not to peek at, 40 percent of children aged three lied about peeking despite assurances from their parents that they didn’t know how to lie.

One hundred percent of five year olds lied. And 83 percent of people lie at job interviews, and 90 percent lie on dates. Furthermore, probably to no Skeptic’s surprise, he said that good liars could easily beat a polygraph test. Good liars are not under stress when they lie, hence no increase in heart rate or any of the other normal body signals monitored by the polygraph.

The BBC wanted to run a countrywide programme to see how well people could tell if a person was lying by their behaviour, facial expression, and voice. Wiseman suggested they use politicians since they must alternately lie and tell the truth and appear sincere. However-no surprise here-none were willing to take part. So an older, respected actor was hired to do two interviews, one where he lied about his favourite film, one where he told the truth. Well, on watching the interviews at the talk, only about one third of our audience picked the lie, one third were wrong, and the other third couldn’t decide.

Liars do not tend to fidget or blink more, or smile real smiles (the muscles around the eye that move and create wrinkles at the corner when you smile are involuntary muscles and not under conscious ‘liar’ control), look to the right and down or look left and up etc, or move their arms or feet more.

Liars do tend to answer more slowly; speak more slowly as they think out the lie (unless the lie has been used repeatedly and is smooth with use); pause more to think; use the word ‘I’ less in descriptions; give less detail in descriptions than for a real event because they are having to invent the details, and link a lie to other events less often.

Prof Wiseman’s parting advice was: to tell if someone is telling the truth, it is better to listen to what a person says and how they say it rather than judge by appearance. Louette McInnes is a teacher at Christchurch Boys’ High School

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