Controversies
Psychologists Charles F. Bond and Ahmet Uysal of Texas Christian University criticized the methodology used by Ekman and O'Sullivan and suspected the performance of the reported Truth Wizards to be due to chance (a type I error), concluding that "convincing evidence of lie detection wizardry has never been presented". Gary D. Bond from Winston Salem State University later replicated the experiment using a more rigorous protocol and found two people to be exceptionally fast and accurate at lie detection out of 112 law enforcement officers and 122 undergraduate students, a result consistent with Ekman and O'Sullivan's. Both experts at lie detection were female Native American BIA correctional officers.
O'Sullivan responded to Bond and Uysal in "Unicorns or Tiger Woods: are lie detection experts myths or rarities? A response to on lie detection 'wizards' by Bond and Uysal". Bond and Uysal had critiqued a chapter which discussed the initial stages for a research program under way. They commented on two different issues in particular. Firstly, the scores of any "Truth Wizard" may have been a coincidence and secondly, the procedures used for testing does not meet the standards of classical psychometric class theory. Ekman, Mark Frank and O'Sullivan also published "Reply scoring and reporting: A response to Bond (2008)"
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