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Tell lies and the truth can leak out in unexpected ways, says Paul Ekman. He became known in the 1970s for his work on the universality of facial expressions and the emotions behind them. Since then he has been working on ways of recognising deception and other signs of ill-intent, skills that are now being used to identify criminals and potential terrorists. His recent friendship with the Dalai Lama is taking him into uncharted waters – for example, whether it’s possible to cultivate goodness in people using “compassion gymnasiums”. He spoke to Michael Bond.

How good do you think people are at reading emotions in others?

We are generally quite good at recognising emotions in someone who is being perfectly frank. Where we fall down is when people mask or conceal their emotions, and then most people don’t know how to decipher the difference between a voluntary and involuntary expression, or to see the emotion behind the mask, the fleeting . People are often not transparent with their emotions, and that can be for totally non-malign reasons: because of embarrassment, or not wanting to appear rude.

Other than the face, what are the most important indicators of what people are feeling?

The voice is important, except that people don’t talk all the time. The more words they speak, the easier it is to tell if they are lying, not because of the words they use but because when a large part of their brain is occupied making words, all kinds of other things leak out.

I’m currently working on symbolic gestures – emblems – which people make unwittingly. We’ve often seen people make gestures that contradict what they’re saying. If I tell someone I think they’re lying, they might deny it but at the same time nod their head slightly. It’s amazing how these work like slips of the tongue. The movements are very precise, and they’re specific to culture. The first time I saw this was more than 50 years ago in my first study as a graduate student, when I convinced my fellow students to undergo stressful interviews to see how they responded. One of the interviewees gave the interviewer the finger without realising she was doing it. These kind of gestural slips are just as revealing as micro-expressions.

Is it always a good idea to teach people to read behind the mask?

I operate on the assumption that we’re better off understanding how the other person is feeling – they’re better off and so are we. My original work on micro-expressions was to try to help identify people who were thinking about taking their life. In this context you’re better off knowing that someone is lying when they say they feel much better.

But once you’ve acquired the ability to read micro-expressions you can’t turn it off. It’s like if you learn to read music, you hear music differently. If I see my wife showing a micro-expression, I know that she’s having emotions she doesn’t want me to see – I cannot avoid knowing that. So I don’t advocate teaching everyone how to read micro-expressions because very often you don’t want to know. If I say to my host after a supper party, thanks for a lovely evening, even though the food was lousy and the company was worse, they don’t want to know the truth, and I don’t want them to know it. Also, I value my privacy. I would not want to live in a world where there was no way for me to hide my emotions.

It seems your work is open to a lot of abuse.

I do get approached by organisations that I would rather not help. I got a phone call from the science and technology ministry of the People’s Republic of China saying, “Could you tell us how you’re using facial recognition to help American intelligence?” I said you’ve got to be kidding, why in the world would I tell you that? It’s not a regime I have much sympathy with.

To an extent the genie is out of the bottle. Like every sword there are two edges to it. I hope the edge that does good is sharper than the one used for harmful purposes. In many contexts such knowledge can be used constructively. Here’s an easy example: a doctor or nurse could use it to see that a patient, because of embarrassment, is concealing talking about what’s causing them pain. If a doctor can ask you to take off your clothes and touch any part of your body, surely they have a right to read the emotions that you’re concealing. That’s in the patient’s interest.

Do you worry about the abuses?

My fellow academics used to criticise me, saying why do you want to help the police? I don’t want to help the police brutalise people, but that’s not what my work is about. Isn’t it in everyone’s interest if the police make more accurate judgements? For example, we found that most of the errors the police make start with their failure to realise that emotions have multiple sources. There are many reasons why someone would look uncomfortable when they’re being questioned. That they’ve perpetrated a crime is only one of the possibilities.

How else are the police using your techniques?

They’re using them to help stop terrorism, for instance, in the US in surveillance situations. We’re teaching security officials at airports or train stations to spot someone who might be behaving in an unusual way. There could be many different reasons why they’re behaving like that, and you can usually clarify that with two or three questions about the purpose of their visit. For example, they might be distressed because they’re travelling to their brother’s funeral.

We’ve also been working with Scotland Yard, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and US homicide investigators on the expressions they remember seeing before someone tried to assault them. We’re finding a lot of agreement between them. I call it a dangerous intent warning signal. I’m waiting to see if I’ve succeeded in convincing my government to give me the funds to see whether it’s the same in non-English-speaking cultural contexts.

How would the police use this?

Our hope is to make it a tool that they can use to recognise when they’re in danger. These are the expressions you’d see, for example, before someone pulled a gun. I first identified this when the US Secret Service gave me a film they’d put together of assassination attempts, some successful, from around the world. In a few of those films I could see the faces of the would-be assassins very clearly, and they all showed the same expression. I call it the Hinckley expression, after John Hinckley, who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981. You can see it very clearly on his face before he pulled the trigger.

Are some people naturally good at telling when someone is deceiving them or lying?

A small minority are, less than 1 per cent. We call them the wizards of deception. They are remarkable. We don’t really know why they’re so good. But they don’t miss anything, in speech, facial expressions, mannerisms or body language. We’re trying to find out if there is something common to their backgrounds or personality types that makes them so good. So far we’ve found nothing. What we do know is that there are two professions where you’re more likely to find such people: the secret service, and dispute arbitrators.

What about natural-born liars?

There is a small percentage, about 4 to 5 per cent of the population, who can lie without giving any sign that they are doing so. They have been getting away with things since childhood, so they are confident in their ability to deceive. But they show no trace of a psychopathic personality such as antisocial behaviour.

“About 5 per cent of the population can lie without giving any sign”

We’re using the wizards of deception to see if they can catch out these natural-born liars, and if they can to get them to help us catch them. I strongly suspect they are people who believe their own lies. If you believe your lie strongly enough, you’re not going to show signs of lying.

At another end of the emotional spectrum, you’ve talked about people having “natural goodness”. Can you explain?

A good example is the Dalai Lama. He exudes goodness. That’s a non-scientific term. But it just feels good to be in his presence. That’s what drives a lot of people to him. If I were 20 years younger, I would try to study people from different walks of life who exude goodness. I think what’s common to them is an extraordinary level of compassion. Some people are born with it. The Buddhists spend a lifetime cultivating it, but we know there are people like that who have had no training at all. The big question is, how do you cultivate global compassion? I have spent some hours discussing with the Dalai Lama how we might develop that capacity in people who don’t naturally have it. For example, I’d like to see if you could run compassion gymnasiums, places where you could go to measure your level of compassion and increase it.

What kind of influence has the Dalai Lama had on you?

He’s a very remarkable man and I’m privileged to be able to spend time discussing these issues with him. We’re a year apart in age, we’re as different as two people can be, yet we have a very strong connection. He’s like the brother I never had. He says that what unifies humankind is that we all have the same emotions. He comes at it from such a totally different perspective. Buddhist thinking developed over 2000 years without any contact with the industrial world. They’ve developed exercises to enhance awareness of momentary experience. My recent interest is in how we can use modern technology to speed up the process, so instead of spending 5000 hours meditating you could spend 5 hours in a brain biofeedback system. I don’t know if it would accomplish the same goal, but if it did the Dalai Lama would be delighted. What he wants is a more compassionate world, and it doesn’t matter to him what technique is used to develop that. Next year we hope to publish a book of our discussions.

We are already running a project to see how a combination of meditation and learning to read micro-expressions can help improve people’s emotional lives. The results are ready for publication and they are quite dramatic, for example, in reducing levels of depression.

You’ve gone from studying how people express emotions to helping people manage them. Is there anything in your background or experience that has led you down this path?

My mother committed suicide when I was 14. My father was physically abusive. I left home when I was 15. I decided I wanted to spend my life trying to help others avoid having to go through the same thing, though at that time I had no idea how I would do that.