Picture this, you're standing in the dusty, sun
-baked streets of ancient Athens. Okay, I'm picturing
it. It's the middle of the day, broad daylight,
and walking towards you is the philosopher Diogenes
of Sinope. Right. But he's doing something incredibly
strange. Very strange. He's holding up a lit
lantern. I mean, in the blinding midday sun,
he is shining this lamp right into people's faces
as they walk by. Yeah, which is definitely going
to get a reaction. Oh, absolutely. And when people
inevitably ask him what on earth he's doing,
he just shakes his head and says he's looking
for just one honest person because he claimed
he couldn't find a single one. It really is a
striking image, you know, this visceral, almost
theatrical demonstration of skepticism about
human nature. Definitely. It immediately forces
us to ask whether anyone is actually capable
of complete honesty or, well, if deception is
just a fundamental part of the human condition.
Exactly. And today, for our deep dive into the
source material, we are looking at a modern day
search for that same kind of honesty, or... More
accurately, we're looking at the search for people
who can actually spot the dishonesty. Right,
the human lie detectors. We are examining the
University of California San Francisco Wizards
Project. And interestingly enough, the researchers
originally named it the Diogenes Project, directly
after our lantern -carrying philosopher. That's
a great little historical nod. Yeah. So it was
led by two researchers, Paul Ekman and Maureen
O'Sullivan. And the mission here is just... fascinating.
It really is. We are trying to figure out if
modern science actually managed to find Diogenes'
honest man. or rather if they found a rare group
of people who possess an almost like superhuman
superpower. The ability to flawlessly spot a
liar. To really understand what Ekman and O'Sullivan
were looking for, we first have to define what
they meant by a truth wizard. Right, because
it sounds like fantasy. It does, yeah. According
to the parameters of their project, a truth wizard
is someone who can identify deception with an
accuracy rate of at least 80%. 80%. Yeah. Now...
80 % might not sound like absolute perfection,
and the project notes that no truth wizard was
ever 100 % accurate on every single test. Yeah,
nobody's perfect. But the term wizard is used
intentionally here to denote a person of amazing
statistical outlier skill. you have to compare
that 80 % to the baseline of the general population.
Right, the average person. Exactly. The average
person sits at a mere 50 % accuracy rate when
trying to tell if someone is lying. Let's put
that in perspective for you listening right now.
If you think you have a great gut instinct when
your teenager tells you they finished their homework
or When a salesperson tells you this is their
absolute lowest price. Which they always do.
Right? Mathematically, you would be just as successful
if you flipped a quarter. 50 % is quite literally
a coin toss. It's totally random chance. So if
the average person is essentially flipping a
coin when trying to spot a lie, an 80 % success
rate isn't just a slight improvement. Not at
all. It's like a baseball player batting .800
for an entire season. It is statistically superhuman.
That's a great way to look at it. To hit 80 %
consistently across multiple controlled tests,
you aren't just guessing well. You're doing something
fundamentally different than the rest of the
population. And the sheer scale of the effort
required to actually locate these individuals
is staggering. I mean, how do you even find them?
Well, Maureen O'Sullivan spent more than 20 years
studying the science of lying and deceit. Two
decades. Two entire decades dedicated to showing
people video clips of individuals either lying
or telling the truth, usually about strongly
held opinions or like... taking money and recording
who could actually spot the deception. That's
a lot of videotapes. When we look at the data
from the Wizards Project, they tested 20 ,000
people from all walks of life. 20 ,000 people.
And out of that massive pool, they identified
only 50 individuals who met the criteria to be
called truth wizards. 50 out of 20 ,000. Yep.
That is roughly 0 .25 % of the population tested.
A tiny fraction. And what I found so compelling
in the sources was the breakdown of exactly who
they were testing to find those 50 people. Because
they weren't just random people. Right. They
didn't just grab folks off the street or run
standard college campus trials. They went to
the professionals. The people whose jobs rely
on this. Exactly. They tested the Secret Service,
the FBI, sheriffs, police officers, attorneys,
arbitrators, cynical psychologists and college
students. Which completely upends the assumptions
we typically make. about professional expertise.
Oh, totally. We assume that if your job involves
interacting with the human psyche or interrogating
suspects, you naturally develop a radar for deception.
Okay, let's unpack this because the demographic
results are shocking. They really are. You would
think that people who spend their lives study
the human mind would be off the charts, but the
source material explicitly states that psychiatrists
and law enforcement personnel showed no more
aptitude than college freshmen. It's wild. Let
that sink in. A freshman who just moved into
a dorm has the exact same lie detecting ability
as a highly trained psychiatrist. Yeah, the data
doesn't lie. But then on the flip side, Secret
Service agents emerged as the most skilled group
overall. Right. It is like finding out professional
food critics. have the exact same palette as
a toddler, while the restaurant's security guard
is a master sommelier. That's a perfect analogy.
Why would someone highly trained in the intricacies
of the human mind, like a psychiatrist, fail
to beat a college freshman? Well, it seems counterintuitive
until we look at the fundamental framework of
what those professions actually demand. OK, what
do you mean? Think about a psychiatrist's job.
Their goal is therapeutic. To help a patient,
a psychiatrist often operates from a baseline
of clinical trust. Oh, that makes sense. They
want to believe them. Exactly. They have to accept
the patient's reality, at least initially, to
build a rapport, explore their feelings, and,
you know, provide treatment. Right. They are
not sitting in an armchair, constantly scanning
their patients for malicious deception. That
would probably make for terrible therapy. Now,
contrast that with the Secret Service. Their
entire operational paradigm relies on hyper vigilance.
Because the stakes are life and death. Right.
They are trained to constantly scan environments
for threats, anomalies, and things that just
don't fit the baseline. They operate from a baseline
of suspicion because missing a subtle cue in
a crowd could be catastrophic. So it's about
what you're practicing every day. Exactly. The
environment you operate in dictates the mental
muscles you develop. So if a Secret Service agent
is operating with that hypervigilant mindset,
what exactly are they scanning for? That's the
big question. Are they just looking for the classic
cliches? We've all been told that if someone
looks up to left or if they cover their mouth,
they're lying. Right, the classic poker tills.
But it can't be that simple if only 0 .25 % of
people are pulling this off. You've hit on the
biggest myth in lie detection. The methodology
of a wizard is where the science gets incredibly
granular. And the first thing the research reveals
is that these truth wizards do not rely on a
single, isolated tell. So there's no magic bullet.
There is no Pinocchio's nose. They aren't waiting
for a specific blink rate or a stutter. What
they are actually doing is spotting incongruence.
Incongruence. Meaning things not matching up.
Exactly. They are looking for behavioral mismatches
between what a person is saying and what their
body is doing. I'm guessing this is where Ekman's
famous research into micro -expressions comes
into play. Those tiny little facial twitches.
Precisely. Micro -expressions are involuntary
facial movements that happen in a fraction of
a second. How fast are we talking? Sometimes
as fast as 1 25th of a second. Wow, that is incredibly
fast. It is. They happen when a person is trying
to conceal an emotion. So a wizard might hear
a suspect saying how sad they are about a missing
person. But for a fraction of a second, the muscles
around their mouth might pull into a one -sided
smirk. Like a tiny slip of the mask. Right. Revealing
concealed contempt or duping delight. The wizards
are processing these micro -expressions and rapidly
cross -referencing them with the person's tone
of voice, their posture, and their word choice.
So, instead of looking for a single tell, like
a blinking light, it sounds like they're listening
to a whole symphony orchestra. And they possess
this rare ability to notice when just one single
instrument plays slightly out of tune. That's
a really beautiful way to put it. I want to read
a direct quote from Maureen O'Sullivan from the
sources, because it illustrates the sheer processing
speed required to listen to that orchestra. Go
for it. She said, our wizards are extraordinarily
attuned to detecting the nuances of facial expressions,
body language, and ways of talking and thinking.
Some of them can observe a videotape for a few
seconds, and amazingly, they could describe eight
details about the person on the tape. Eight details?
A few seconds. And they pull eight distinct,
nuanced details. It is a remarkable cognitive
feat. I mean, they are taking in a massive amount
of data, filtering out the noise, and identifying
the mismatches almost instantaneously. That's
wild. And it's precisely this kind of seemingly
magical ability that caught the attention of
the broader public and pop culture. Oh, definitely.
Ekman's work directly inspired the Fox TV series
Lie to Me, which ran from 2009 to 2011. I remember
that show. Tim Roth. Yeah. And if you watch that
show, you might remember the character Ria Torres.
The show explicitly framed her as a natural,
which is television shorthand for exactly what
Ekman and O'Sullivan called a truth wizard. Right,
the person who just has the gift. And Ekman himself
leaned heavily into this framing. In an NPR interview,
he actually called these individuals the Mozart's
of lie detection. Mozart's. That's a strong comparison.
He posed the question of whether they learned
this skill or if they just had it natively. the
way Mozart seemingly had a native genius for
music. That NTR interview highlights a very interesting
duality in the project's findings. What do you
mean? On one hand, Ekman explicitly points out
that the phenomenal success rate of these truth
wizards is achieved without any specialized training.
Right, they're naturals. They are described as
naturals. Yet, simultaneously, Ekman claims that
the components of this skill, specifically the
detection of micro -expressions, can be taught
to the average person. Wait. Really? Yeah. In
fact, he released a training CD designed to do
exactly that. Wait, I have to jump in and push
back on this. Let's hear it. How can he call
them the Mozart's of lie detection and explicitly
note they achieved these incredible hit rates
without any specialized training, but then turn
around and claim he can sell a CD that trains
anyone to do it? It sounds contradictory, doesn't
it? You cannot just buy a CD and learn to compose
a symphony like Mozart. You can't commercialize
innate genius. That feels like a massive contradiction
in the source material. It is a tension that
strikes right at the heart of the debate over
innate talent versus learnable skills in psychology.
So how does he justify the CD? What Eggman essentially
argues to bridge that gap is that while the holistic
ability, that seamless, rapid integration of
body language, speech, and micro -expressions
all at once, might be a rare, innate talent like
Mozart's musical genius, the individual components
of that ability can still be isolated and taught.
OK, I think I follow. Think about returning to
your orchestra analogy. Not everyone can be a
world -class conductor, but almost anyone can
be taught to recognize the sound of a violin
versus a cello. Ah, okay. The CD is designed
to teach you how to spot the violin, the micro
-expressions. It's just one element the wizards
use. But does spotting the violin make you a
world -class conductor? Exactly. Whether learning
that one element actually elevates a normal person
to the level of a wizard is where the scientific
community started to raise red flags. Because
whenever you make bold claims about identifying
a human superpower and then start commercializing
the training for a piece of it, you are practically
begging for heavy scientific scrutiny. You are
painting a target on your back. You can't just
claim to have found human polygraphs without
someone checking your math. And the scrutiny
came heavily from psychologists Charles F. Bond
and Ahmet Yuzal at Texas Christian University.
What did they find? They took a hard look at
the methodology Ekman and O'Sullivan were using
and they were incredibly critical. Their primary
argument was that the performance of these supposed
truth wizards was essentially statistical illusion.
Illusion. Yeah. In statistics this is known as
a type I error, a false positive. Let me break
down the skeptics argument here, because it makes
a lot of intuitive sense. Go for it. If you have
20 ,000 people flip a coin, eventually someone's
going to flip heads 20 times in a row just by
pure unadulterated luck. Exactly. Just the law
of averages. It doesn't mean they have a magical
psychic connection to the coin. It is just the
law of large numbers. Bond and Usal are basically
saying, you tested 20 ,000 people. Of course,
you found 50 people who scored over 80%. Right.
If you test enough people on anything, Eventually,
someone will ace it by chance. That is just statistical
noise. That captures their critique perfectly.
They concluded quite boldly that convincing evidence
of lie detection wizardry has never been presented.
Ouch. Furthermore, they criticized the original
researchers for not fully publishing their methodological
techniques and specific results for peer review.
That's a big no -no in science. And they also
pointed out that the testing procedures didn't
meet the rigorous standards of classical psychometric
theory. Which means, what exactly, in plain English?
It means the tests weren't built in a way that
reliably proves these people had an actual repeatable
skill rather than just a streak of incredibly
good luck. So the test itself was flawed? According
to them, yes. In classical psychometric theory,
a test has to be reliable and valid. Bond and
Usul argued, we don't know if the video clips
Ekman used were standardized. Like, were some
clips easier than others? Exactly. Were some
lies just easier to spot? Were the stakes for
the people lying in the videos high enough to
generate real micro -expressions? Because lying
about what you had for breakfast isn't the same
as lying to avoid jail time. Right. In science,
if you can't show exactly how your test separates
genuine skill from random chance, your conclusions
will be heavily contested. Did Ekman respond?
O'Sullivan, Ekman, and their colleague Mark Frank
did publish responses defending their scoring
and reporting, but this shadow of doubt was definitely
cast. The only way to truly settle a debate like
this in science is through replication. Which
brings us to an incredible twist in the story.
It really is. Gary D. Bond, a researcher from
Winston -Salem State University, decided to replicate
the experiment. But he used a much more rigorous
protocol to avoid the very criticisms levied
against the original project. He wanted bulletproof
conditions. He wanted to see if the phenomena
held up when the testing conditions were, you
know, flawless. And he didn't test 20 ,000 people,
though. He tested a much smaller pool, just 112
law enforcement officers and 122 undergraduate
students. So 234 people total? Right. Out of
that group of 234 people. He found exactly two
individuals who were exceptionally fast and accurate
at lie detection. Two people. Two. A result,
the source notes is actually consistent with
Ekman and O'Sullivan's baseline findings of how
rare this is. But here's where it gets really
interesting. Who were they? The crazy part is
who those two people were. Out of all the cops,
all the investigators, and all the students,
the only two experts were both female... Native
American correctional officers working for the
Bureau of Indian Affairs. Wow. Yeah. It is incredibly
specific and fascinating demographic finding.
And precisely because this replication used a
much more rigorous protocol, it lends significant
weight to the idea that this phenomenon is not
just a statistical coin flip. Because the pool
is so much smaller. Exactly. If it were purely
chance, finding two experts in a pool of only
234 people is statistically much less likely
than finding 50 in a massive pool of 20 ,000.
But does finding those two BIA officers actually
validate the theory that wizards exist? Or did
lightning just happen to strike twice in a smaller
pool? It's the multi -million dollar question.
I mean, what is it about being a female Native
American correctional officer for the Bureau
of Indian Affairs that would forge someone into
a truth wizard? This is where we have to look
at the intersection of environment culture, and
high stakes communication. The sources suggest
there might be environmental or cultural factors
that hone these observational skills to a razor's
edge. OK, tell me more. Think about the layers
of that specific job. First, you have the environment
of a correctional facility. The baseline there
is deception. Right. Inmates frequently use manipulation
to navigate the prison hierarchy, secure contraband,
or gain privileges. If you are an officer, your
physical safety depends on your ability to read
the room and spot incongruence before a situation
escalates. So they share that hypervigilance
we talked about with the Secret Service. Precisely.
But there are thousands of correctional officers
across the country. Why these two women specifically?
Well, we have to consider the nuances of cross
-cultural communication and power dynamics. As
Native American women working in law enforcement,
they are navigating incredibly complex jurisdictional,
cultural, and institutional layers. That makes
a lot of sense. Historically and practically,
marginalized groups often have to develop a heightened
situational awareness just to navigate dominant
power structures safely. You have to learn to
read the subtle, nonverbal cues of the people
and power around you. Survival. Right. Furthermore,
many indigenous cultures place a heavy emphasis
on non -verbal communication, listening, and
observing rather than just prioritizing a spoken
word. Wow. When you combine a cultural attunement
to non -verbal cues, the necessity of reading
power dynamics as a minority woman, and the life
or death stakes of a correctional facility, you
create an environment that acts as a pressure
cooker for this specific skill. It's the perfect
storm. It moves the needle away from a statistical
fluke and strongly points toward a high specialized
human adaptation. That completely changes how
we should look at this. It is not magic. It is
a profound survival mechanism. It's human nature
adapting. So what does this all mean for you
listening to this deep dive? Think about the
people you interact with daily. The co -workers
pitching an idea, the acquaintance telling a
story at a party or, you know, someone trying
to sell you a car. Everyday interactions. The
hard data shows that the average person is only
right 50 % of the time when spotting a lie. You
might think you have a great radar, but statistically
you are just flipping a coin. Sad but true. The
biggest takeaway from the Wizards Project is
that we need to stop looking for that one single
cliché tell. Stop thinking that just because
someone breaks eye contact or stammers for a
second or shifts their weight, they're automatically
lying to you. It's just not that simple. Human
behavior is way too complex for that. True experts
that rare 0 .25 % don't look at one thing. They
process a complex rapid -fire web of micro -expressions
and behavioral mismatches across the entire body
and voice. They listen to the whole orchestra.
Exactly. They listen to the whole orchestra.
I want to leave you with one final thought to
mull over, building on the context of those BIA
officers. Let's hear it. The source material
repeatedly notes a very specific phrase regarding
these truth wizards. It states they achieved
this astounding success rate without any specialized
training and that they are extraordinarily attuned.
Right, that natural ability. So if these incredibly
rare individuals didn't learn this in a classroom
or from a CD, where did they learn it? That's
the real question. What kind of unique life experiences,
high -stakes environments, or even hidden personal
histories might force a person to develop this
kind of natural hypervigilant radar for deception
just to navigate the world safely? It makes you
wonder. Maybe Diogenes wasn't looking in the
wrong places with his lantern after all. Maybe
he just didn't know exactly what to look for
in the flicker of the light.