Close Up
Researcher unmasks and deciphers deception's many forms
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Video: Mark Frank featured on CBS News. | Watch video
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“The parts of the brain that process emotion and control voluntary movement both send signals to the face. When liars try to conceal their feelings you get this tug-of-war over control of your face.”
It might be the odd expression that flickers across your face for a fraction of a second that gives you away. Or maybe the unusual amount of eye contact you make will betray the truth.
Either way, if you’re lying to him, UB researcher Mark Frank will probably know. A native Buffalonian who joined the Department of Communication in 2005 as an associate professor, Frank is an expert in detecting deception, in scrutinizing nonverbal cues such as body language, to figure out if someone is hiding the truth.
He doesn’t make a point of ferreting out liars in day-to-day conversation, but tricksters, swindlers and cheaters beware: Frank has studied faces for so long that even slight clues—an eyebrow arched strangely for just a moment, perhaps—could be a giveaway.
His talents are useful on campus and off. Students who have not done their work are less likely to lie—“they just confess,” Frank says. Law enforcement agencies looking to catch crooks have asked him to help train their personnel.
His research has won him interviews with news organizations ranging from The New Yorker and The Sydney Morning Herald to the BBC, the Discovery Channel and The Oprah Winfrey Show. (See CBS video below.) His popularity with the media is no surprise. His studies deal, after all, with a human struggle—that of controlling one’s emotions. As Frank explains, the parts of the brain that process emotion and control voluntary movement both send signals to the face. When liars try to conceal their feelings, “You get this tug-of-war over control of your face,” he says.
Frank’s fascination with deceit began in the early 1980s when, as an undergraduate at UB, he worked as a bouncer at a now-defunct bar on Delaware Avenue. The moment he made eye contact with some customers, “there would be a break or ‘disfluency’ in their movement that said, ‘All right, they’re underage,’” Frank recalls. Other patrons just looked as if they were up to no good, though Frank couldn’t always pinpoint why.
“I thought I got really good at reading people, and I was interested in what the science of it was,” he says. “The real world is not a controlled experiment. When you ask people how good they are at catching liars, they think they’re really good. They know how many lies they caught. But they had no idea about the lies that they didn’t. That’s how the real world works. You don’t get complete feedback.”
Frank’s curiosity launched a whirlwind career revolving around this question: “How good are we at reading people by just looking at them?” He began studying the topic at Cornell University, where he completed a Ph.D. in social psychology in 1989. A National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health enabled him to conduct postdoctoral research with Paul Ekman, one of the giants in the field. In 1992, Frank joined the faculty of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he stayed for about four years before taking a position at Rutgers University.
Then an opportunity arose to move back home. UB wanted Frank to return as a faculty member. His parents and a couple of siblings still lived in the area, along with a clan of aunts, uncles and cousins. Ultimately, though, it was the job that brought Frank back.
“There’s no way I would commit career suicide to come here,” he says. “It’s a level-one research university, and the communication department here is a very hard science department. We have really world-class scientists.”
At UB, Frank continues to oversee groundbreaking research—the type that, over the years, has led law enforcement agencies ranging from the FBI to London’s Metropolitan Police Service to solicit his help.
In one study under review by an academic journal, he and colleagues found that with just 30 minutes of training, U.S. Coast Guard officers could double their success in recognizing “micro-expressions”—expressions of fear or other negative emotions that flash across liars’ faces, appearing and disappearing in under half a second.
Another recent project debunks the notion that people avoid eye contact when they are not telling the truth. In fact, Frank and fellow researchers discovered, liars are more likely, at times, to look people in the eye.
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