The Naked Negotiator

Have you watched the drama ‘Lie to Me’ where actor Tom Roth plays the super-confident, abrasive Cal Lightman intuitively solving crimes and saving lives by his canny ability to read body language and ‘micro expressions’.

The role of Cal Lightman is actually based on a real character Professor Paul Ekman - a human lie detector who boasts a 95% accuracy rate.Most people, even police, customs officials, judges perform little better than they would by guessing. Picking liars for most of us is a game of chance.

So what makes Ekman so good? Ekman has spent most of his career studying faces and micro expressions. Ekman started with tracking monkey’s facial expressions and their links to behaviours that followed. Years of practice watching slow motion tapes of known truth tellers and liars followed.

By critiquing his performance, author Sheena Iyengar tells us in The Art of Choosing, “Ekman developed the ability to automatically detect and focus only on micro expressions, filtering out irrelevant body language and what the person was actually saying”. Ekman’s method ‘informed intuition’ captures the best of reflex thinking and the benefits that come from careful analysis.

Many of the hero’s featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink use informed intuition. The best poker players combine game strategy, knowledge of the cards in play and skilful watching of opponent’s body language to calculate whether an opponent is bluffing.

If you are serious about becoming an expert like Paul Ekman you must be prepared to put in years of practice and to continually critique your performance.

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