Attempts at lie-detection have been around ever since we first deceived - pretty much as soon as humans walked upright. Most countries outside the US have moved on from the polygraph - although prosecutors in India are now using electroencephalograms to “prove” guilt, despite the science being bitterly disputed.

So are there any reliable indicators of mendacity? Tics - fidgeting, stuttering - are mistakenly attributed to cheats across many societies (psychologist Charles Bond has noted this belief in 63 countries) without recourse to scientific proof.

Ditto the avoidance of eye contact - dropping your inquisitor’s gaze is often given anecdotally as confirmation of guilt.

“Eye contact has been proven the least accurate thing to watch for,” says Stan Walters, author of The Truth About Lying. “Most reliable cues typically come from the voice, in specific, the words.”

Professor Richard Wiseman (…) says that common sense is the lie-buster’s best weapon, and affirms that it is aural rather than visual clues that are key. (…)

“Lying taxes the mind,” Wiseman explains. “It involves thinking about what is plausible. People tend to repeat phrases, give shorter answers, and hesitate more. They will try to distance themselves from the lie, so use far more impersonal language. Liars often reduce the number of times that they say words like ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’. To detect deception, look for aural signs associated with having to think hard.”

According to the Canadian Journal of Police and Security Services, another side-effect of lying that forensic interrogators will look for is the avoidance of verbal contractions - using “I am” instead of “I’m” and so on.

Nature reported another study by Ioannis Pavlidis of Honeywell Laboratories in Minnesota. He established that many people blush when they are telling a lie - a subtle, but detectable, phenomenon.

{ Wired UK | Continue reading }

Here’s a consolation prize to the millions who recoil in bafflement from cellphone companies’ labyrinthine price plans, with their ever more intricate arrays of minutes, messages and megabytes: Economists don’t understand them, either.

“The whole pricing thing is weird,” said Barry Nalebuff, an economics professor at the Yale School of Management. “You pay $60 to make your first phone call. Your next 1,000 minutes are free. Then the minute after that costs 35 cents.”

To economists, it simply doesn’t make sense to make chatterboxes pay that penalty. After all, most businesses tend to give discounts to customers who buy more.

It would be easy to see the cellphone companies simply as avaricious oligopolists trying to gouge consumers for every penny they can. And in some senses they are aiming to maximize revenue, at least as much as the market will let them. (…)

Neither the cellphone companies nor their customers, as it turns out, always act in the rational way that economists might predict. Consumers often put immediate gratification and the avoidance of unpleasant surprises above their long-term interests.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

illustration { Chris Ware }

It’s said that dogs sniff each other as a kind of canine equivalent to the human handshake; an otherwise meaningless “greeting ceremony” which reportedly started in medieval times as a way of checking the other guy for weapons.

But is it really just a social gesture? Does it have an adaptive purpose? (…)

We know that at least 33% of a dog’s brain is devoted to processing olfactory information whle in humans that figure is closer to about 5%.

Marc Bekoff wrote that “[a dog’s nose] can distinguish T-shirts worn by identical twins, follow odor trails, and are 10,000 times more sensitive than humans to certain odors.” (…) So if a dog’s nose can pick up information from yellow snow, from the fear that hangs in the air after another dog leaves an examination room, from scents left behind by the shoes of an escaped prisoner, or from lifting its nostrils to the wind, why would a dog need to stick his nose directly into another dog’s snout, genitals, and nether regions to garner social information? Couldn’t he do that at a “safer” distance? (…)

Dog trainer and natural philosopher Kevin Behan says it’s a way of grounding themselves. “Anytime there is … any change, any stimulus or stimulation, and especially when stressed, dogs need to smell something.”

{ PsychologyToday | Continue reading }

related { Answers about exploring New York with your dog. }

{ Calf with Cats for Ears | Abandoned Veterinary School of Anderlecht, Belgium via animal NY | More: The Horror Labs }