Paul Ekman - Criticisms

Criticisms

Ekman's work, particularly its applications to airport security via the Transportation Security Administration's "Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques" (SPOT) program, has been criticized for not having been subjected to controlled scientific tests. A 2007 report on SPOT stated that "simply put, people (including professional lie-catchers with extensive experience of assessing veracity) would achieve similar hit rates if they flipped a coin". However, Ekman's TSA work was funded by DARPA. As part of their defense department procedures, Ekman's approach was assessed using the military blue and red teams: the blue team was charged to use Ekman's techniques; the red team was charged with defeating the blue team. Ironically, Ekman was assigned by DARPA to head the red team, that is to defeat his own measures. The TSA approach was tested in several major airports in the US, but also in South Korea, Israel and several European airports. In fact, the screening procedures have already demonstrated that they can pick out major felons in a crowd.

The methodology used by Ekman and O'Sullivan in their recent work on Truth wizards has also received criticism on the basis of validation. Other criticisms of Ekman's work are based on experimental and naturalistic studies by several other emotion psychologists who, in the last two decades, did not find evidence in support of discrete emotions and discrete facial expression, thus questioning Ekman's proposed taxonomy.

Ekman argues that while some anthropologists continue to suggest that emotions are not universal, there has been no quantitative data to support the claim that emotions are culture specific. In his 1993 discussion of the topic, Ekman states that there is no instance in which 70% or more of one cultural group select one of the six universal emotions while another culture group selects labels the same expression as another universal emotion.