Wizards of Lie Detection

“Wizards” of lie detection, or “truth wizards,” are people with an unusually high rate of accuracy in lie detection. As defined by the Wizards Project, wizards are at least 80 percent accurate in their identification of truths and lies, compared with the 50 percent rate in an average person (the same rate achieved by means of sheer chance, like flipping a coin). Out of 20,000 people tested by the project, only 50 were identified as wizards, indicating that lie detection talent is more sparsely distributed in the population than academic prowess or athletic ability. Initial criticism focused on the possibility that the discovery of such a small number of wizards could indicate sheer coincidence. A Winston Salem State University study, however, while using a smaller sample size (about 250 people), found similar results.

The Wizards Project was organized by psychologists Maureen O'Sullivan and Paul Ekman at the University of California, San Francisco, and was originally called the Diogenes Project, after the Greek philosopher Diogenes. One of the questions raised by the project's study is where lie detection ability comes from: whether it is learned, a side effect of other competencies, an innate talent, or whether there might even be a gene for it. Apart from Secret Service agents, in the initial study, law enforcement professionals and psychologists performed no better than undergraduate volunteers, which suggests that it is not an ability simply developed by working in a field in which lie detection is useful.

Ekman is one of the most widely cited researchers in psychology as a result of his work in the project, especially his study of the way that facial expressions reveal emotion, which are then detected by wizards. He has argued for biological correlates to emotions and emotional responses, a model that has become central to the field of evolutionary psychology and which restored the Darwinian view of emotional expression after a period in which it had fallen out of favor because of the dominance of the anthropological view that specificity of emotional expression was culturally determined. This difference between cultural and biological determination is key to the concept of truth wizards as understood by the project and research based on its findings.