At the beginning of 2009, a US television drama was launched entitled Lie to Me. It has proved to be extremely popular in its home country and in the UK. The stories are largely based around the character of a so-called psychological detective, Cal Lightman, and his right-hand woman, Gillian Foster. While Foster is portrayed as a relatively conventional police-assisting applied psychologist, the key character is Lightman, who specialises in being able to detect whether someone is lying with far greater sensitivity and accuracy than you or I could. He does this by scrutinising the suspect (usually their face) with great intensity, by video analysis (lots of zooming, freeze-framing and slow motion replaying) or by staring into their faces from an embarrassingly close proximity.
The intensity of this in-your-face scrutiny was humorously illustrated in an episode when Lightman’s ex-wife, answering the question about why she left him, responds by saying she was fed up with a man who only stared her in the eyebrows while she was wearing a thong. The series portrays Lightman as having great success in ‘seeing through’ lies and pretences. A key question is: could this actually happen in real life?
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