Synopsis
The project defined a "Truth Wizard" as a person identified who can identify deception with accuracy of at least 80%, whereas the average person rates around 50%. No Truth Wizard was 100% accurate. "Wizard" is used to mean "a person of amazing skill or accomplishment".
O'Sullivan and Ekman identified only 50 people as Truth Wizards after testing 20,000 (~0.25%) from all walks of life, including the Secret Service, FBI, sheriffs, police, attorneys, arbitrators, psychologists, students, and many others. Surprisingly, while psychiatrists and law enforcement personnel showed no more aptitude than college freshmen, Secret Service agents were the most skilled.
O'Sullivan remarked, "Our wizards are extraordinarily attuned to detecting the nuances of facial expressions, body language and ways of talking and thinking. Some of them can observe a videotape for a few seconds and amazingly they can describe eight details about the person on the tape."
Scientists are currently studying Truth Wizards to identify new ways to spot a liar.
Truth Wizards use a variety of clues to spot deception and do not depend on any one "clue" to identify a liar. Truth wizards have a natural knack for spotting microexpressions. They also home in on inconsistencies in emotion, body language, and the spoken word with amazing skill.
Ekman said on NPR: "We're still trying to find out how in the world did they learn this skill? Are they the sort of Mozarts of lie detection; they just had it?"
Ekman points out that the success rate of Truth Wizards is "without any specialized training," and claims that anyone can be trained to detect such microexpressions, and has released a training CD to do that.
Read more about this topic: Wizards Project