Leakage

Even when people are highly motivated to deceive others, their behaviors and expressions may betray them. Cues that indicate one's true feelings seep out involuntarily through verbal or nonverbal channels, known as “leakage.” During instances of deception, as people try to mask what they really feel or think, information about their true states may be revealed without their conscious monitoring or control. Although they are sometimes used interchangeably in the literature, a distinction can be made between leakage and more general deception cues. Specifically, leakage refers to behaviors or expressions that reveal a person's true states or feelings, whereas deception cues are those that reveal a person to be lying but give no indication as to the content of the lie. Deception cues are typically independent of context, whereas leakage cues are tied to specific situations. Emotion researchers, verbal and body language analysts, and lie detection experts have attempted to identify, with arguable success, specific and systematic leakage The topic of leakage and deception has been widely studied in the psychological literature, as well as popularized in the media, over the past few decades.

One well-known event serves as a common example of leakage. In a now infamous 1998 White House press conference, then-president Bill Clinton looked directly at the video camera, shook his finger, and adamantly claimed he, “did not have sexual relations with that woman,” a reference to White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, many Americans believed Clinton. In polls following his on-air denial, 91 percent of people expressed doubt that he had had an affair. His statement was, of course, later proven false as intimate details of an extended sexual relationship with Lewinsky came to light.

Although the American people were duped, body language and lie detection experts claimed to have easily seen Clinton's true feelings. For instance, they noted that during his press conference, Clinton engaged in several “microshrugs,” tiny shoulder movements noticeable only in slow motion, that betrayed the certainty of his words. In addition, the words that woman raised alarms, as experts claimed it marked an attempt to psychologically distance himself from his lies. Others noticed an almost imperceptible softening of the volume of Clinton's words at the end of the sentence, indicating a lack of conviction in his statement. Alone, each cue may not have amounted to much; together, they leaked a set of “tells” that experts claim intimated Clinton's affair.

Indicators of deception leak out involuntarily when people lie. For example, a meta-analysis [Page 590]of 35 different studies found that deceptive tells include fidgety hand movements, increased blinking and enlarged pupils, frequent speech errors, increased speech hesitations, higher voice pitch, and discrepancies between verbal and nonverbal channels. Such cues to lying, however, are idiosyncratic to the person; for example, some people simply fidget more in everyday life compared to others, even when not attempting to deceive. Nonetheless, as Charles Darwin first suggested and Paul Ekman later popularized, many internal states cannot be completely masked because people are not aware of or voluntarily controlling the behavioral consequences of those states. As a result, even the most well-trained actors, or well-prepped politicians, may leak information about their true thoughts and feelings during deception. One notable exception to this is people with psychopathic disorders; because psychopaths do not typically feel strong genuine emotions, their emotional expressions are easier to mask and leakage is not as likely to occur.

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