What does a liar look like? Can a fleeting facial expression expose the truth, and are comedians better than most people at faking emotion?
In Episode 33, comedian Bradford Oakes joins former police officer, behavioural expert and forensic interviewer Steve Van Aperen for a funny and fascinating exploration of facial expressions, deception, intuition and the signals we send without saying a word.
Steve introduces the pioneering work of Professor Paul Ekman, whose research into universal facial expressions helped inspire the television series Lie to Me. He explains the Facial Action Coding System, the emotional states that appear across cultures and the micro-expressions that can flash across a person’s face in a fraction of a second.
But can a micro-expression prove someone is lying? Steve separates popular mythology from behavioural science, explaining why a single gesture, facial movement or nervous habit means very little without context. Reliable assessment requires clusters of behaviour, a baseline and an understanding of what was happening before and after the moment in question. Even trained professionals, he notes, are often only slightly better than chance at detecting lies from behaviour alone.
Brad brings the comedian’s perspective, revealing why performers must make their faces match their stories and how they recreate surprise after delivering the same joke hundreds of times. He also recalls being dismissed by his personal trainer for being “untrainable”, getting hypnotically close to buying an imaginary car and falling for a suspicious offer involving a near-new Ford Falcon for just $2,000.
The conversation also examines genuine and fake smiles, cultural display rules, the body language that can signal an approaching pub fight, the sensory detail found in truthful memories and the reasons intelligent people can still be manipulated by convincing con artists.
Naturally, it begins with Brad threatening to punch ChatGPT in the head after an exhausting attempt to build his new website, before admitting he has been secretly cheating on it with Google and Claude.
Are you good at reading faces? What red flags or green flags do you notice when meeting someone for the first time? And can you tell when somebody is lying?
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