The Ultimate Body Language Book

Chapter 16 - Deception and Lie Detection
The Facial Action Coding System Or FACT
Another Way To Detect Lies
Scientists have uncovered tics and flutters that can tell us when people aren’t telling us the truth. FACT
or the Facial Action Coding System is a system that deals with forty-six facial movements classified
into more than 10,000 microexpressions. The manual details how the face behaves based on the
muscles that control it. The guide is a combination of still images, digital video and written descriptions
and is of interest not only to lie detectors, but also to animators, computer scientists who create facial
recognition software and other personnel who need to know how the face moves and why such as
psychotherapists and interviewers.
According to its proponents FACT can detect deception with a seventy-six percent accuracy. According
to researcher Paul Ekman, thousands of people have been trained to read these signals from
transportation security to administrative personnel. In fact, FACS has been recently implemented in
U.S. airports as terrorist-screening. In other words, you may want to look up FACS and avoid the
expressions least you get pulled aside for an uncomfortable cavity search! FACS however, is by no
means beginners reading material, however, the idea is to be able to codify the information into
software that can then be interpreted by a human operator.