Detecting Deception with Mark Frank

Working nights during college as a bouncer, Mark Frank discovered he could learn a lot about people by observing their facial expressions and body language. Now, as a professor of communication at the University at Buffalo, he’s an internationally recognized expert on nonverbal communication who advises the FBI and CIA on interviewing techniques and whose research helped inspire the TV crime drama “Lie to Me.” In this episode of Driven to Discover, Frank talks to host Tom Dinki about the involuntary gestures and expressions that give our real feelings away, the universally accepted yet completely bogus connection between eye contact and the truth, and why building rapport is the best way to snag a criminal.

Credits: 
 
Host: Tom Dinki
Guest: Mark Frank
Writer: Laura Silverman
Production and editing by UB Video Production Group 

Coming Oct. 6: Early on, social media fostered conversation and connection. Now it’s flooded with bots, influencers and, increasingly, AI-generated content. In the next episode, communication researcher Yini Zhang discusses the evolution of social media, how it has shaped our information landscape, and its broader impact on politics and society. 

Transcript

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Tom Dinki:

As a University at Buffalo student, Mark Frank worked his weekends as a bouncer.

Mark Frank:

Yeah. A bar is quite an interesting little laboratory and you end up getting really good at reading people, who's trouble, who's under age, or other issues that arise.

Tom Dinki: 

Now, as a UB professor of communication, Frank reads more than just bar patrons. He studies the facial expressions and body language of everyone, from study participants to potential terrorists, for signs of deception. He's advised the FBI and CIA on interviewing techniques and appeared on numerous reality television shows about the art of lying, including the Curiosity Stream series “Inside the Mind of a Con Artist.” His postdoc work even partially inspired the Fox show “Lie to Me.” All of this has given him a reputation as a sort of human lie detector, but Frank says it's a bit more complicated than that. There's no Pinocchio response, as he likes to say: that telltale sign that guarantees someone is lying. But our behavior can reveal a lot about our emotions and our intent. 

Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is Tom Dinki. And on this episode, I'll be talking to Dr. Frank about what behavioral science can and can't tell us about whether someone is lying. 

Dr. Frank, you first got interested in behavioral science in a bar. Can you tell us about that?

Mark Frank:

One of the things that happens when you work in a bar is you get to observe a lot of people, how they behave, what they're doing, what their intentions and so on and so forth are. And you start to learn some of their particular habits. For example, when people would come around the corner and you'd see them and you'd make that first eye contact, the under-agers always had this little break in their stride as they then tried to sort of steel themselves and hope to get in without getting carded along the way. Similarly, people who were trouble, just the way people would look at each other, and so on and so forth. And if you could anticipate the problem ahead of time, you could prevent the problem. So for example, the nights when I worked, we might have one or two little confrontations. Other nights guys worked, four or five confrontations.

This is what usually happens. And it's always about 1:00 at night, by the way. That's like the bewitching hour. Alcohol content has gone up. The presence of women has gone down. And now the guys are frustrated. Then it's, "What are you looking at? What are you looking at?" And then that's what ends up producing the fight. But just how they hold their bodies, how they look at each other, the amount of blinking, the angles in which they stand to each other, and so on and so forth. But it's real world. It's real people feeling real emotions. And there's really nothing better to sort of train on in that regard. 

With the exception, of course, it's not a controlled experiment, so a lot of times what you think is going to happen may not happen. So you just don't know with these things. And that's why moving into a laboratory, of course, enables you to know what the reality is down the line, and to be able to correlate those behaviors that you saw with what is the reality, in terms of what's going on inside of people. Because that's the ultimate task, basically. I'm looking at you. How do I know by looking at you on the outside, what's going on on the inside? And therefore, which are the reliable nonverbal clues that might suggest these things.

Tom Dinki:

So you graduate from UB. You get your social psychology PhD from Cornell University. Then you end up having to choose between a job with the NSA or doing postdoc work under UC San Francisco, Professor Paul Ekman, generally considered the world's foremost expert on behavioral science. How did you make that decision?

Mark Frank:

Yeah, it was a tough one. I had applied for this postdoc grant to work with Paul Ekman. He liked what I was doing in my dissertation. He said, "I have no money, but here's this National Research Service award. If you apply for that, put me down as a sponsor." And of course, the lag period is like six months, so you don't know whether you have it. Meantime, I got recruited to take a job with NSA, started that process, and then I found out I got the postdoc. So it came down to thinking like, wait, here I have an opportunity to train with the world expert, and I thought, this is a really rare opportunity. And that I could always go back to the government and be better trained, so I could sort of have my cake and eat it too. So I decided then to sort of turn down the government position and do the postdoc.

Tom Dinki:

And a lot of Dr. Ekman's research while you were his postdoc inspired the show “Lie to Me.”

Clip from “Lie to Me”:

For Dr. Cal Lightman, actions speak louder than words.

Whether you're a suburban housewife or a suicide bomber, body language tells the truth.

Tom Dinki:

Tell us about that research and how it maybe was unique for that particular time.

Mark Frank:

Well, one of the things that made Dr. Ekman's work stand out to me, so even going back to the bar—when I started reading the scientific literature on nonverbal behavior, there were a lot of people who did various studies on faces and so on, but there was only one line of research that said, hey, this kind of matches what I see with my own eyes working in the bar, or in day-to-day life. And that was Paul Ekman's work. And it was really talking about the fact that there is this sort of nexus of voluntary and involuntary behaviors that we generate, and those are the things that produce the behaviors that you see. So sometimes it's done on purpose. You give someone a wink. You give them a thumbs up. Sometimes it happens involuntarily. So maybe your eyebrows come up into the middle, you know, or you get a blush or you get these other sorts of things. And so Ekman's work was really at the confluence of these two things.

The work we did with Dr. Ekman was interesting because we were able to create a higher stake lie situation in the laboratory. One of the big problems in the published research on deception is most of the studies involve little to no stakes. Meaning: You lie, get away with it, nothing happens to you. Lie, get caught, nothing happens to you. Whereas the type of lies you want to catch in day-to-day life are the ones that involve criminal behavior and so on and so forth. Those have very high stakes. If you get away with it, you can literally get away with murder. You get caught, you can go to jail or worse.

And so therefore we were able to create some of these scenarios in the laboratory where, for example, people had an opportunity to steal $50 in cash and then they would go and get interrogated about it. And if they fooled the interrogator, they got to keep the money, but if they didn't, they had to give the money back. And we set up this little small room with these big stereo speakers and said, "You will be detained for an hour and be hit with 110 decibel blasts of white noise delivered over..."

Now, we never did that to anybody, but what it did is it raised the stakes, it engaged the emotional system. And then that produces very different patterns of behaviors than if we just play a little game. "Okay. I'm going to say I was born in May. Am I lying or telling the truth?" Who cares? And in fact, in our day-to-day life, politeness almost requires us not to care. Right? "Oh, thank you, I had a good time. Oh, thank you for the tie. Thank you for the socks, grandma." Maybe you wanted the video game. It's sort of this kind of social lubricant in many ways, and we don't examine it too closely nor maybe should we. But the other sorts of things in law enforcement, intelligence, those are the ones that are important to catch. And so therefore the better you're able to represent those, I think the more benefit you can provide to those people who we as a society entrust to detect the bad guys.

Tom Dinki:

So would it be fair to say that behavioral analysis is less about figuring out whether someone is lying and more about understanding their emotions enough to kind of guide your line of questioning?

Mark Frank:

Yeah. I think that's the right way to think about it in some ways. I mean, everybody wants the lie detector. "Woop, you touched your nose. You're lying. Woop, you did this. This means you're lying." And there's nothing like that. There is no unique behavior in all people that guarantees the fact that somebody is lying. But there is much better research on things to show you when you're angry, when you're afraid, when you're happy, when you're distressed, and so on and so forth. So the basic human emotions. Moreover, there are also signs of when people are thinking. So you, uh, you, uh uh, you might get repeats like this. Uhhhhhhhhhhh. You might get that, you know, these long what we call filled pauses, delays in response, and so on and so forth. So there are a lot of clues that suggest when people are thinking and when they're feeling, and those are reliable markers of that.

And now if I ask you a basic question and you have to think about it, then that might trigger some suspicion, like, "Why do you have to think? I just asked where were you 10 minutes ago and you can't give me a,” you know, that suggests to me that maybe I need to ask more questions. And similarly with the emotions. You say, "Hey. He's a good guy." Now of course this is a podcast, you can't see it, but I've raised my upper lip. Well, the upper lip is what we see when people feel the emotion of disgust. So I just said you're a good guy and I showed disgust. Those two things don't fit. So maybe I need to ask you more about the nature of the relationship. And this is the essence of what we teach with law enforcement, is to look for these, in essence, anomalies, contradictions, whatever you wish to call them.

Tom Dinki:

And we've probably all seen a detective show or maybe a YouTube video where someone claims they can absolutely guarantee someone is lying. Are there any kind of common myths about behavioral analysis that you want to take this opportunity to kind of dispel?

Mark Frank:

How long you got? Okay. Well, here's... In a movie, “The Negotiator,” for example, Samuel L. Jackson lectures this guy and he studies liars.

Samuel L. Jackson:

You're lying, and I know you're lying.

J.T. Walsh:

What, you read my mind, Roman? Is that it?

Samuel L. Jackson:

No, I'm not. I'm reading your eyes. The eyes can't lie.

Mark Frank:

And he's basing it, if your eyes go to the left, that means you're recalling. If it goes to the right, it means you're creating. There's zero evidence of that. There were like 20-something published papers trying to identify that left, right eye movement. And this was taught to law enforcement, even in the FBI Academy. And we had to work to get them to stop it because there was no published study that actually showed that that particular pattern existed. But yet it's great entertainment in the movie.

They did a study of, like, 75 different countries and 43 different languages and they asked people, "What was the No. 1 sign that gives away the fact that someone is lying?" And that study suggested that the No. 1 sign in virtually every culture was, "Liars don't look you in the eye." Turns out that is false. Although it's kind of true for kids up to about age seven or eight, but once those same kids get to be like 12, 13, it no longer works. Why? Because teachers and parents gave them the formula. Right? Teachers and parents said, "Look me in the eye and tell me you did your homework. Look me in the eye and tell me you didn't hit your sister." So what do kids learn from that? Well, if you want to be a good liar, make sure to look someone in the eye. And so therefore that clue goes away. And if anything, sometimes you actually get a little bit more eye contact when people are lying because they know if they look away, they're going to get caught, so you get this kind of open-eyed stare, "No, I didn't," in an unblinking kind of a lock eye sort of approach that happens. 

Those are just some of them. There was a study saying that liars, when they lie they touch their nose. Well, that was a study based on one subject. Now he was a former US president, begins with a ‘B,’ ends with an ‘ill Clinton.’ But when you base it on one subject, it's not really, you know, and the research literature doesn't support it in general too. And again, you go on the internet, "Red flag indicators of deception," a lot of that stuff just isn't true.

Tom Dinki:

And you've also done research on building rapport during interviews. I guess I'm curious, how does building rapport with a subject actually help you to better analyze them?

Mark Frank:

Yeah. It's funny. Always in the literature, it was a totally underappreciated aspect of any of the research studies because the whole purpose of an interview, right? We used to do training with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and we'd always say, "Okay. What's the purpose of an interview?" And some guy would always shoot his hand up in the air, "I know. Get a confession." We’d go, "No. It's to find the truth." And that's the purpose. What does this person really know? And why do they know it? And why do they believe it? And the best way to do that is to build a relationship with somebody, which means building rapport. In fact, if you actually look at the FBI agent, his name was Ali Soufan, who got the information for where Osama bin Laden was hiding from that courier, he was a rapport builder. Okay? Rapport consists of similarity, empathy and liking, finding something you have in common with people.

A couple things happen once people are in rapport. First off, they start to mirror each other's body language and so on. So you can speed up the rapport process by actively finding something you have in common, mirroring the body language, and so on and so forth. So when you're in rapport, two things happen that are useful to an investigator. Number one, people are willing to disclose more information. The second way in which rapport works for you is that when people are in rapport, they feel more comfortable, they feel more relaxed, and now if they do lie to you, all of a sudden those behaviors become easier to see.

Take the sort of absurd example. Let's say you do all your interviews at gunpoint. Okay? "So where were you Saturday?" And there's a gun pointed at the person's head and their eyebrows are up and they're trembling and so forth. There's no room to show any behavioral change. You've sort of maxed this out. Where instead, if you build rapport, now I ask you, "Well, tell me more about this person that you mentioned." And "uuuh." Maybe the person didn't want you to see it. Now if they have a little emotional reaction—and again, emotions are interesting because they're involuntary; we don't pick and choose our emotions—now you have something to go on that you can then probe further in terms of your discussions.

Tom Dinki:

So in a good cop or bad cop situation, it seems like good cop is the way to go if you're really trying to analyze someone?

Mark Frank:

Yeah. And in fact, there is an approach that was taught for a long period of time that really starts out very aggressive and it's good for getting confessions, but it's also been implicated in most of the false confessions. So it would start out, it would be like, "Tom. There's one thing, Tom, I just want to know is just why you did it." I would not ask you if you did it. And then the pressure mounts from there. And so it's nonstop pressure, pressure, pressure. Whereas we think this rapport building, not only is it more humane, but you get better information. This is the limits of torture. Under torture, people tell you what they think you want to hear, but what you want is the truth in whatever way. And rapport's a better way to do that.

And even with witnesses, we published a study almost 20 years ago where people witnessed an event. It was somebody actually committing suicide, it was kind of shocking. And then they were interviewed as witnesses, like, "You were a witness to this event." And the interviewer was neutral, was kind of a jerk, or built rapport. And when they built rapport, these people remembered 50% more accurate information.

Tom Dinki:

You're also doing some work with artificial intelligence with the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education here at UB. Can you tell us about that?

Mark Frank:

Yeah. The AI Institute here at UB, this is really interesting. In this case, we're using AI for good, if you will, but focusing on the nonverbal elements is my part of it along with my colleague, Ifeoma Nwogu. And what we're doing is, Ifeoma and I have done a couple papers looking at computer vision systems measuring rapport and now looking at things like faces and other body language things. And so looking at creating some kind of orchestrator that can observe, for example, children interacting as they're being taught. These are children with learning disabilities. When are they frustrated, when are they happy, when do they feel, they get this realization they got something, when are they confident—you know, just all the various kinds of emotions—and develop systems that can read that and give feedback.

Tom Dinki:

Some of your research also deals with misinformation. What can you tell us about that part of your work?

Mark Frank:

Yeah, you know, one of the fundamental threats to this country is people having very different perspectives on reality. And there are a lot of bad actors out there who would like to get people to believe all sorts of things. And to live in a democracy, we have to have at least some agreed view of reality. And again, there are, this goes into the intelligence community, people pumping in a lot of misinformation. And one of the things this university has done, which is great, is there are a lot of people here, really excellent people, dealing with elements of this problem. In my case, with some of the nonverbal and deception. There are other people dealing with it in computers, other people looking at tweets and online behavior, and so on and so forth. UB has put together the Center for Information Integrity to examine this, to bring all these different individuals in there with their different skill sets in terms of their, you know, computer science or in terms of even things like looking at misinformation through literature. And so it's put us all together to address one of the most fundamental threats to this nation.

Tom Dinki:

Do you ever notice people in your day-to-day life, maybe even your students, nervous to tell you something or potentially lie to you because they think you'll be able to tell they're lying?

Mark Frank:

It was funny. When I first started teaching my nonverbal class, I really didn't say, "Hey. I studied deception," or whatever. And you got the standard stuff. This was at my other university before here. And then one day I decided, oh, let me just tell them a little bit about my research on deception. And boy, that created a bit of a sea change, because you'd be in your office and you'd see the student out there, and they're pacing and they're pacing, and then they come in and they're nervous, and then there's a pause, and then there's, "Okay. I'm sorry. I just didn't get the chance to do the paper. Is there any way I can get an extension?" No dog ate my homework. No series of dead grandmothers or whatever. It’s just, poof, they just come right out and they give it up. And so that was kind of interesting.

Tom Dinki:

Okay. I guess I have to ask. How would you analyze my behavior during this interview?

Mark Frank:

It was pretty straightforward, like you've done this before. And so it wasn't anything too, you know, nothing that made me get alarmed. There are certain behaviors that make me get alarmed, that tell me somebody's feeling distressed, and so on and so forth. For example, the inner corners of your eyebrows. There's a study done, only five out of 200 people can just raise the inner corners on purpose. So when I see those go, that tells me somebody's feeling a little bit distressed. And then I say, "Okay. Well, how do I need to adjust from that?" Whether I want to see it or not, it doesn't matter. I just see it. It's just one of those things. So you didn't do anything like that.

Tom Dinki:

That's good to hear, yeah. Dr. Frank, thanks so much for joining us and thanks for the great conversation.

Mark Frank:

Well, thank you, Tom. This was a treat. Thank you.