Easier to detect liars if faces veiled: study
Niqab eliminates reliance on cues, researcher says
In a landmark finding inspired by a Supreme Court ban on women testifying in niqabs, a Canadian study has come to the surprising conclusion it is easier to detect liars if their faces are veiled.
“There’s concrete data from over 500 people showing that, in fact, the courts were incorrect,” said Amy-May Leach, an associate professor at the Oshawa-based University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
Leach’s study, published in the latest journal of the American Psychological Association, had volunteers guess the truthfulness of women in niqabs and women without.
The result? “Veiling actually improved lie detection.”
“People were focusing on what the women are saying, rather than what they look like,” said Leach.
In a 2013 ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada effectively banned woman wearing niqabs from testifying.
At issue was an Ontario sexual assault trial in which a 38-year-old woman alleged two relatives had sexually assaulted her from a young age.
The woman, who was identified only as N.S., was not allowed to testify wearing a niqab. Ontario Judge Norris Weisman said it would unfairly hide her “demeanour” during crossexamination.
“There is a deeply rooted presumption in our legal system that seeing a witness’s face is important to a fair trial,” read the Supreme Court decision upholding Weisman’s decision.
In her study, Leach showed female volunteers one of two videos featuring a woman and a backpack. In one video, the woman watches vigilantly over a backpack. In the other, she rifles through the backpack to steal its contents.
After the video, the volunteers were led into a mock courtroom to be questioned by a “prosecution” and a “defence.” Whatever video they saw, they had to maintain no theft had taken place. Thus, anybody who saw the “stealing” video was forced to lie.
Trials were staged with volunteers having their heads uncovered, wearing a hijab (a Muslim hair covering) or a full-face covering niqab.
Videos of the trials were then played to a second set of volunteers who were asked to guess if the witness was telling the truth.
For unveiled women, the liars were correctly spotted at a rate of about 50 per cent — no better than if they had flipped a coin.
“It was only when wit- nesses wore veils (i.e., hijabs or niqabs) that observers performed above chance levels,” the study found.
Subsequent repeats of the experiment in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands found similar results.
Interestingly, this went against what the veil-wearers themselves had suspected. Leach said the religious garb gave participants a false sense of security that their lies would be believed.
Where it gets really strange is that Islamic face veils seem to be the only kind of face covering that turned people into bad liars.
In another study, Leach tested the effect of balaclavas on witnesses and found no discernible difference.
Research has also tested the relative truth detection between a visible witness and one shielded behind a screen. There again, there was no discernible difference.
Before going into academia, Leach spent four years as an officer with the Canadian Border Services Agency, a job with the unique requirement to be able to detect liars.
Contrary to popular belief, she said there’s no “Pinocchio’s nose” indicator border agents use to root out criminals. An agent would never send travellers to secondary inspection because they looked up and to the right, for instance.
Rather, the best lie detection comes when an agent can pose questions that trip up a liar. A good example is asking someone to recount their trip in reverse chronological order; easy for the honest traveller but panic-inducing for the smuggler who is trying to stick to a madeup itinerary.
Similarly, Leach suspected the niqab is better at outing liars because viewers are not distracted by smiles, raised eyebrows or other tics that aren’t actually that good at signalling a liar.
“It eliminates people’s reliance on incorrect cues,” she said.
What remains to be studied, however, is the minefield of potential biases opened up when a Canadian jury is faced with a complainant in a niqab.
Ample research has pointed to Westerners associating Muslim garb with aggression or deviousness. On the other hand, in sexual assault cases the bias might play to the advantage of a veiled complainant; given her obvious strict religious background, it lends credence to the idea she would not have come forward unless the accusations were true.
While Leach’s study found no evidence of discernible bias among volunteers, she noted they were all urban university students, a group accustomed to seeing women in Muslim face coverings.
Now, she is planning to expand the experiment.
“Is this something that we’re going to find no matter who we test anywhere, or are some more likely to show this pattern of results than others?”
VEILING ACTUALLY IMPROVED LIE DETECTION. PEOPLE WERE FOCUSING ON WHAT THE WOMEN ARE SAYING, RATHER THAN WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE. — AMY-MAY LEACH, UNIVERSITY OF ONTARIO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY