Product Description

From breaking the law to breaking a promise, how do people lie and how can they be caught? Paul Ekman, a renowned expert in emotions research and nonverbal communication, has now updated his groundbreaking inquiry into lying and methods for uncovering lies. From the deception strategies of international public figures, such as Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon, to the deceitful behavior of private individuals, including adulterers and petty criminals, Ekman shows that a successful liar most often depends on a willfully innocent dupe. His study describes how lies vary in form and can differ from other types of misinformation, as well as how a person's body language, voice, and facial expressions can give away a lie but still escape the detection of professional lie hunters—judges, police officers, drug enforcement agents, Secret Service agents, and others. Photographs and line drawings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9394 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 386 pages

Review
Ekman [is] a pioneer in emotions research and nonverbal communication. . . . Accurate, intelligent, informative, and thoughtful. -- Carol Z. Malatesta, New York Times Book Review

[A] wealth of detailed, practical information about lying and lie detection and a penetrating analysis of the ethical implications. -- Jerome D. Frank, The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

About the Author
Paul Ekman is professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Customer Reviews

A good book
I enjoy reading this book. It's a nice look into how people lie and the clues of deceit.

Good data, interesting style
This book has lots of important information, not the least of which is to correct many misconceptions about signs of deceitfulness and the distinction between signs of anxiety and signs of deceit.

Ekman does a good job of defining important categories of non-verbal behavior and correlating increases or decreases in each of the categories with different emotional states. However, the specific facial changes associated with genuine versus feigned emotional expression identified in this book offers nothing new.

I particularly liked the author's narrative style. It was reminiscent of accounts written by 19th Century scientists who were trying to discover fundamental principles by observing natural phenomena and describing them in careful, objective language. The bonus to the reader is the raw data provided with specific conditions carefully and objectively described. The studies employ ingenious designs to elicit desired emotion and, because of the detailed description, allow the reader to formulate hypotheses and draw conclusions -- some of which may differ from those of the author.

Much of the information about deceitfulness presented here is just common sense, but Ekman does a good job of categorizing this information and presents well-described objective data from which his conclusions are drawn.

An awful mess of a book
For anyone interested in detecting lies in the marketplace, politics, and marriage: this is the last book you should buy. Slight exaggeration aside, there are probably 3 semi-valuable pages in this book.

Ekman spends about 275 pages trying to convince you that even if you believe someone is lying, you might be wrong...or, actually, you may be right...The entire book is a dizzying succession of tautologies. He is so scared that you will read his hypotheses (which are of no practical value - who can spot a "micro-expression" without buying his $50 software and training on it for a month?) and accuse an innocent person of lying (or vice versa) that he has rendered this book useless. If you are a masochist and are interested in reading a book where an insecure researcher talks to himself for hundreds of pages, by all means buy this book.

There IS a reliable protocol for detecting lies, and there are at least a couple of books that I know of that go over it in detail, in less than 200 pages.