Emotional Intelligence Myth#2: Micro-expressions work

In 2009 I attended a ‘Mind & Its Potential’ Conference in Sydney.  Among the speakers was Paul Ekman who introduced the Australian audience to micro-expressions.  These are brief flashes of the emotional truth belying a false face and last between one twenty-fifth and one-fifth of a second.  During his talk we underwent a training program where there would a face on the screen showing one emotion and which would suddenly show another emotion for microseconds and then revert back.  Ekman used a portfolio of seven emotions and I think 25 pictures.  At the end of session he asked us to put our hands up we had got more than 20 right, 15, 10 etc.  I was terrible at the recognition and I think of the audience of say 500 people two of us admitted we got less than five images correct.

Afterwards I bought Ekman’s book and then decided I would to the course that he sells on-line to improve your results.  While there was some improvement – I got around 40% correct – it was still pretty poor and I must confess that I concluded this was not a technique for me.

For those unfamiliar with Ekman’s work the core hypothesis is that The face is the most powerful indicator of deception.  According to Ekman micro-expressions tell you whether a person is lying or not.  His technology is the basis of the TV program Lie to Me and Ekman is famous for his ability to read faces for signs of what people are thinking and feeling. In his best seller Blink, Malcolm Gladwell writes that "much of our understanding of mind-reading" is owed to Ekman and his collaborators.  Ekman’s work helped inspire an immense federal program in American airports called SPOT, for Screening of Passengers by Observational Techniques. Costing about $200-million annually—$900-million in all since 2007—the program, run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), deploys more than 3,000 officers to look for behavioural cues in the faces and body language of airline passengers.

So somewhat chastened by my experience and Ekman’s reputation I decided that I would I put the micro-expression technology in the bottom drawer.

However a recent article The Liar's 'Tell': Is Paul Ekman stretching the truth? paints a completely different picture about the usefulness of micro expressions.  There have been a number of experts testifying before Congress that Ekman’s work lacks scientific validity.  The result was in November 2013, the Government Accountability Office recommended that Congress cut the funding of the TSA program. The watchdog agency argued that neither scholarship in general nor specific analyses of SPOT offered any proof that malign intent could be divined by looking at body language or facial cues.

The article argues the pros and cons of using micro-expressions.  The one safe conclusion from the article is there is no doubt being able to hear a prospective liar talk and listening carefully to the narrative noticeably improved lie detection results and also made the training more effective.

In our workshops we teach our participants a simple mnemonic TOPDOG which stands for talk, organisation, position, dress, office, and gambit.  By using the following clues:

1.      The way the individual talks (we agree here with Ekman);

2.      The organisation the individual works for;

3.      The individual’s position in the organisation;

4.      The individual’s dress;

5.      The individual’s office or working environment;

6.      The first meeting with an individual

participants learn within several hours how to recognise which of the seven core emotions are dominant in a person’s temperament.  They learn how to quickly recognise the group most likely to lie, the corporate psychopaths. 

According to my Chinese partner, Michael Chen of Zest Learning, who this year has signed up over 20 major organisations on selling and management training programs in China it is TOPDOG which is the most attractive part of the training programs.