A critical look at Paul Ekman, Joe Navarro, and the entire "behavior expert" industry
A talk with former CIA officer Kent Clizbe about the exaggerated, irresponsible claims made by many self-described “behavior experts,” focusing especially on Paul Ekman, Joe Navarro, microexpressions,...
20 Sep 1h 54min
Army Psy-Op veteran talks influence, blowback, psy-op myths, and more
A talk with an Army Psychological Operations soldier about what military psy-op work really involves—and how different the reality is from many people's ideas about the nature of that work. We discuss...
28 Aug 1h 28min
Can computers spot lies better than humans?, with Bennett Kleinberg
Can machines spot a lie better than we can? I talk with psychology researcher Bennett Kleinberg, whose work brings together psychology, machine learning, natural-language processing, and deception det...
12 Aug 1h
Inside a Scientology e-meter auditing session, with Chris Shelton
Former Scientologist Chris Shelton spent thousands of hours using the e-meter to "audit" fellow members of the Church—but what does the device actually measure, and why do Scientologists trust it as a...
2 Aug 1h 23min
How Pete Blair scored 100% in a deception detection study
In a 2014 deception detection study, Pete Blair made 33 judgments—and got all 33 right. That paper was titled “Expertise in deception detection involves actively prompting diagnostic information rathe...
24 Jul 1h 3min
Behaviorally, poker and interrogations are very different
Zach Elwood, author of influential books on poker tells and host of the People Who Read People podcast, joins The Deductionist podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about what we can and can't learn...
10 Jul 49min
Understanding defenses of the polygraph, with David Goldberg
Polygraphs are a controversial tool in criminal investigations: critics argue they're too unreliable to trust, while proponents say that, even if they’re not perfect, they nonetheless can play a valua...
1 Jul 1h 19min
The push for science-based interrogation approaches, with Maria Hartwig and Christian Cory
In real or fictional criminal interrogation scenes, you've probably seen the approach where police barge in and confront the suspect with the evidence, trying to get them to crack and give a confessio...
20 Jun 53min
