science

Wizards Project

Wizards Project is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Wizards Project rather than just read about it. In short: The Wizards Project was a research project at the University of California, San Francisco led by Paul Ekman and Maureen O'Sullivan that studied the ability of people to detect lies. The experts identified in their study were called "Truth Wizards".

Key takeaways

Wizards Project belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Wizards Project to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Wizards Project from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Wizards Project was a research project at the University of California, San Francisco led by Paul Ekman and Maureen O'Sullivan that studied the ability of people to detect lies. The experts identified in their study were called "Truth Wizards". O'Sullivan spent more than 20 years studying the science of lying and deceit. The project was originally named the Diogenes Project, after Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek philosopher who would look into people's faces using a lamp, claiming to be looking for an honest man.

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 were reported to use multiple cues when assessing deception rather than relying on a single indicator. Research associated with the project suggested that they paid attention to microexpressions as well as inconsistencies in emotion, body language, and speech. 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 microexpressions, one element used by Truth Wizards to spot deception in some case, and has released a training CD to do that.

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)". In addition, the methods employed by the original researchers have also come under criticism, with suggestion that methodological techniques and particular results have not been published fully.

In popular culture Ekman's work is the inspiration for the Fox TV series Lie to Me (2009–2011). One of the show's main characters, Ria Torres, is a "natural", that is, a Truth Wizard.

References

External links Lying and Deceit: The Wizards Project Archived 2012-08-15 at the Wayback Machine Scientists Pick Out Human Lie Detectors, nbcnews.com

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Wizards Project

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Wizards Project claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Wizards Project before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Wizards Project ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Wizards Project

In research: Wizards Project appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Wizards Project in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Wizards Project is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Giftedness, Lie detection, Psychology experiments, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Wizards Project outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Wizards Project in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Wizards Project means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Wizards Project out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Wizards Project in simple terms?

Why does Wizards Project matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Wizards Project?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Wizards Project.