Human lie detectors almost never miss, study finds

As he lies, the young man shrugs, flutters his eyelids and shakes his head. Another, on a witness stand, grimaces for a millisecond as he answers a question.

Most people believe they could easily detect such lying behavior, but in fact most miss a good 50 percent of lies, says deception expert Maureen O'Sullivan of the University of California San Francisco.

But O'Sullivan says she has found a special group - just 1 percent of those she has tested - who catch a lie nearly 90 percent of the time.

"We call them wizards," O'Sullivan told a briefing sponsored by the American Medical Association on Thursday. "Wizardry is a special skill that seems magical if you don't have it."

These wizards have a special ability to ferret out little tics that show when a person is lying.

She and her colleagues have so far screened 13,000 people for their ability to catch a liar on videotape. "We found 14 people who we called ultimate experts," she said.

They could tell when people deliberately lied about feelings, committing a crime or their own opinions.

Another 13 were good at detecting specific types of lies. For example, she said, "There was a group of cops who got very good scores - they got 80 percent or more on crime but none of them did well on the video about feeling."

Now O'Sullivan is trying to find out how they do it. She finds they have little in common so far, except a motivation to catch liars. Some have advanced degrees, some only a high school education. About 20 percent had alcoholic parents.

"They are located all over the country. We sit down and go over the ... videotapes. I ask them to think aloud. I tape-record them thinking aloud," she said.

While most people know to look for certain cues as a person lies, these wizards intuitively find an individual's peculiar cues. One may shrug when lying, and another may make fleeting expressions of disgust or even amusement.

"There are lots of clues. The problem is how do you put them together and how to you make any sense of them?"

O'Sullivan said her findings could help train better lie detectors - for instance, federal agents or therapists who need to know when someone is telling the truth.

She is not sure about other real-world applications.

"We have made an offer to the federal government that it might be interesting to have them as sort of panel when they have high profile investigations," she said.

What about analyzing the presidential debates between President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry?

O'Sullivan just laughed.