Behavioral detectionGrowing questions about TSA’s behavioral detection program

TSA has spent roughly $1 billion training thousands of “behavior detection officers” as part of theScreening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program. The purpose of SPOT is to identify facial and body expressions that signals terrorist activity. The results have not been impressive: fewer than 1 percent of the more than 30,000 passengers a year who are identified as suspicious end up being arrested, and the offenses have not been linked to terrorism.

A November 2013 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommended that the TSA should reduce future funding for the agency’s behavioral detection program because there is little evidence of the program’s effectiveness. According to the GAO, “available evidence does not support whether behavioral indicators, which are used in the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program, can be used to identify persons who may pose a risk to aviation security.”

The recommendation was supported by a survey in which psychologists Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo analyzed more than 200 studies in which participants correctly identified 47 percent of lies as deceptive and 61 percent of truths as nondeceptive, resulting in an average of 54 percent — only 4 percent better than chance. Accuracy rates were lower in experiments when judgment had to be made relying solely on body language.

“The common-sense notion that liars betray themselves through body language appears to be little more than a cultural fiction,” says Maria Hartwig, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

The New York Times reports that TSA administrator, John Pistole has defended the SPOT program, saying it identified “high-risk passengers at a significantly higher rate than random screening.” The GAO report challenged the methodology behind Pistole’s conclusion and questioned the cost-effectiveness of the program.

Researchers have found that the best clues to recognizing liars are verbal clues. Dr. Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, has found that people over-rely on reading facial expressions. “Reading people’s expressions can give you a little information, but you get so much more just by talking to them,” he says. “The mind comes through the mouth.”

Epley explains why people believe they can read body language in his book on the topic, Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want. “When you’re lying or cheating, you know it and feel guilty, and it feels to you as if your emotions must be leaking out through your body language,” he says. “You have an illusion that your emotions are more transparent than they actually are, and so you assume others are more transparent than they actually are, too.”

— Read more in Aviation Security: TSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection Activities (GAO, November 2013); Charles F. Bond, Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo, “Accuracy of Deception Judgments,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, no. 3 (2006): 214-34; Bella M. DePaulo et al., “Cues to Deception,” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 1 (2003): 74-118; Richard Wiseman et al., “The Eyes Don’t Have It: Lie Detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming,” PLoSOne (11 July 2012) (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040259); Julia Shaw et al., “Catching liars: training mental health and legal professionals to detect high-stakes lies,” Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology 24, no. 2 (17 January 2013): 145-59 (DOI: 10.1080/14789949.2012.752025)