Wizards Project

The Diogenes Project was a research conducted by Paul Ekman and Maureen O'Sullivan that attempted to study the ability of people to detect lies told by others. The project was named after the Greek philosopher who would look into people's faces using a lamp, claiming to be looking for a honest man.

The research showed that microexpressions often could be used to reliably detect lying, and that a very small percentage (about 1% of the population) of those he studied had natural, untrained aptitude at reading faces and body language to determine emotion and intention. It also collected information on the demographics of these people. Surprisingly, while psychiatrists showed no more aptitude than college freshmen, Secret Service agents were the most skilled, able to tell the truth from a lie 80% of the time.

Ekman afterwards claimed that anyone can be trained to detect such microexpressions relatively easily, and released a training CD for that purpose.

External links

• The Diogenes Project in the Face2Face website
• METT online, the microexpression detection training program by Paul Ekman