The Liar's 'Tell': Is Paul Ekman stretching the truth?

By Christopher Shea
The Chronicle
Originally published October 10, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

But Ekman’s lie-detection work has recently taken some hard blows. He has long had academic critics (unmentioned in Blink) who say he has not proved that his behavior-based lie-detection techniques actually work. In November 2013, the Government Accountability Office took things up a notch by recommending that Congress cut the funding of the TSA program. The watchdog agency argued that neither scholarship in general nor specific analyses of SPOT offered any proof that malign intent could be divined by looking at body language or facial cues.

Plenty of academics share this negative view of SPOT. "I really don’t think the current program at TSA is doing anything to protect us," says Charles R. Honts, a professor of psychology at Boise State University, who has consulted with the Department of Defense on behavioral observation.

The entire article is here.

Linguistic Traces of a Scientific Fraud: The Case of Diederik Stapel

By David Markowitz and Jeffrey Hancock
Published: August 25, 2014
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0105937

Abstract

When scientists report false data, does their writing style reflect their deception? In this study, we investigated the linguistic patterns of fraudulent (N = 24; 170,008 words) and genuine publications (N = 25; 189,705 words) first-authored by social psychologist Diederik Stapel. The analysis revealed that Stapel's fraudulent papers contained linguistic changes in science-related discourse dimensions, including more terms pertaining to methods, investigation, and certainty than his genuine papers. His writing style also matched patterns in other deceptive language, including fewer adjectives in fraudulent publications relative to genuine publications. Using differences in language dimensions we were able to classify Stapel's publications with above chance accuracy. Beyond these discourse dimensions, Stapel included fewer co-authors when reporting fake data than genuine data, although other evidentiary claims (e.g., number of references and experiments) did not differ across the two article types. This research supports recent findings that language cues vary systematically with deception, and that deception can be revealed in fraudulent scientific discourse.

The entire article is here.

Cambodian Activist’s Fall Exposes Broad Deception

By Thomas Fuller
The New York Times
Originally published June 14, 2014

The fall from grace of one of Cambodia’s most prominent social activists and the unraveling of her sad tale of being an orphan sold into sex slavery has highlighted what aid workers here say is widespread embellishment and in some cases outright deception in fund-raising, especially among the country’s orphanages.

Somaly Mam, who rose from rural poverty in Cambodia to become a jet-setting and glamorous symbol of the fight against the exploitation of women and children, stepped down last month from the United States-based charitable organization that carries her name after details of her widely publicized story were thrown into question.

The entire article is here.

The Lies That Doctors and Patients Tell

By Sandeep Jauhar
The New York Times
Originally published February 20, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Physicians sometimes deceive, too. We don’t always reveal when we make mistakes. Too often we order unnecessary tests, to bolster revenue or to protect against lawsuits. We sometimes mislead patients that our therapies have more value, more evidence behind them, than they actually do — whether it was placebo injections from my grandfather’s era, for example, or much of the spinal surgery or angioplasty that’s done today. 

Perhaps the most powerful deceptions in medicine are the ones we direct at ourselves — at our patients’ expense. Many physicians still espouse the patriotic (but deeply misconceived) notion that the American medical system is the best in the world. We deny the sickness in our system, and the role we as a profession have played in creating that sickness. We obsessively push ourselves to do more and more tests, scans and treatments for reasons that we sometimes hide from ourselves. 

The entire article is here.

Why Do Some Falsely Claim to Be Victims?

By Benjamin Radford
Discovery News
Originally published December 5, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

There are several factors that help hoaxers get away with their false reports. One of them is that victims are given special status based on the simple — and usually true — assumption that they actually have been victimized. Most people who report insults and crimes against them are telling the truth. The vast majority of physical and sexual assaults, property crimes, auto thefts and so on are real and legitimate. Hoaxers exploit this fact by hiding their faked reports in a sea of genuine ones.

Until the public and police become suspicious, hoaxers are given the benefit of the doubt, attention and assistance and treated with sympathy.

Hoaxers also often gain credibility through real or claimed membership in an oppressed or respected group. Our culture bestows respect and credibility on certain groups, such as mothers, members of the military, professionals, some minorities including the gay community, the elderly, clergy and others.

In many cases the claims themselves are often lacking significant details. They are plausible enough to be taken seriously by supporters and the public, but when police and experienced investigators examine their story, parts don’t add up.

The entire story is here.

Argosy University Denver fined $3.3 million for deceptive practices

By Anthony Cotton
The Denver Post
Originally posted December 5, 2013

Argosy University Denver, a for-profit school, will pay $3.3 million in restitution and fines for engaging in deceptive marketing practices, the Colorado attorney general's office said Thursday.

"Our investigation revealed a pattern of Argosy recklessly launching doctoral degree programs without substantiating or supporting that they led to the advertised outcomes," Deputy Attorney General Jan Zavislan said in a statement. "That is illegal under Colorado law and why we are holding Argosy accountable."

The entire story is here.

Does Studying Economics Breed Greed?

By Adam Grant
Author of Give and Take
LinkedIn article
Published October 21, 2013

In 1776, Adam Smith famously wrote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Economists have run with this insight for hundreds of years, and some experts think they’ve run a bit too far. Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell, believes that his profession is squashing cooperation and generosity.  And he believes he has the evidence to prove it.

Consider these data points:

Less charitable giving: in the U.S., economics professors gave less money to charity than professors in other fields—including history, philosophy, education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, physics, chemistry, and biology. More than twice as many economics professors gave zero dollars to charity than professors from the other fields.

More deception for personal gain: economics students in Germany were more likely than students from other majors to recommend an overpriced plumber when they were paid to do it.

Greater acceptance of greed: Economics majors and students who had taken at least three economics courses were more likely than their peers to rate greed as “generally good,” “correct,” and “moral.”

The entire article is here.

Committee supervises ethics of human testing

By Madison Pauly
The Dartmouth
Published on Monday, February 25, 2013

From new cardiology studies to students that go overseas and want to interview people, the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects answers ethical questions about human research at Dartmouth. The committee is an interdisciplinary group of experts and community members who analyze the risk posed to participants by Dartmouth-affiliated researchers’ studies.

As Dartmouth’s incarnation of a federally-mandated institutional review board, the committee analyzes proposals for research on human subjects from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, as well as the College’s graduate and undergraduate departments.

While all studies involving human participants are subject to review by the committee, those that receive funding from sources other than the government must pay a review fee to the committee office.

A division of the Provost’s Office, the committee is financed in part by federal funds allocated to Dartmouth for research. Accordingly, its review process follows federal policies to ensure “respect for persons, beneficence and justice,” according to a Department of Health and Human Services report.

Major areas of ethical concern include the research’s medical relevance, involvement of vulnerable populations, its informed consent process and use of deception, said assistant provost for research Liz Bankert, a member of the committee.

The current federal regulations were last revised in 1991 and often fail to give adequate ethical guidance on modern research questions, said Bankert, who also serves on a national research ethics advisory committee.

The entire story is here.

The Straight Path

A Conversation with Ronald A. Howard
Sam Harris Blog
Originally posted April 20, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

As I wrote in the introduction to Lying, Ronald A. Howard was one of my favorite professors in college, and his courses on ethics, social systems, and decision making did much to shape my views on these topics. Last week, he was kind enough to speak with me at length about the ethics of lying. The following post is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Ronald A. Howard directs teaching and research in the Decision Analysis Program of the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.  He is also the Director of the Department’s Decisions and Ethics Center, which examines the efficacy and ethics of social arrangements.  He defined the profession of decision analysis in 1964 and has since supervised several doctoral theses in decision analysis every year.  His experience includes dozens of decision analysis projects that range over virtually all fields of application, from investment planning to research strategy, and from hurricane seeding to nuclear waste isolation.  He was a founding Director and Chairman of Strategic Decisions Group and is President of the Decision Education Foundation, an organization dedicated to bringing decision skills to youth.  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of INFORMS and IEEE, and the 1986 Ramsey medalist of the Decision Analysis Society.  He is the author, with Clint Korver, of Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life.

(cut)

Harris: Let’s return to the case in which you are in the presence of someone who seems likely to act unethically. Can you say more about honesty in those situations?

Howard: Well, I’d make a distinction between the maxim-breakers—in other words, a person who is harming others or stealing—and those who are merely lying or otherwise speaking unethically. Lying is not a crime unless it’s part of a fraud. If someone asks for directions to Wal-Mart, and you know the way but you send them walking in the opposite direction—it’s not a nice thing to do, but it’s not a crime. Imagine if they came back with a policeman and said, “That’s the man who misdirected me.” You could say, “Yeah, I did. It just so happens that I like to watch people wandering in the wrong direction.” That’s not a crime.  It’s not nice behavior. It might be reason for someone to boycott your business, or to exclude you from certain groups, but it’s not going to land you in jail.

I make a careful distinction between what I call “maxim violations”—interfering with peaceful, honest people—and everything else.

Harris: Yes, I see. It breaks ethics into two different categories—one of which gets promoted to the legal system to protect people from various harms.

Howard: In fact, there are also two categories in the domain of lying. The first is where people acknowledge the problem—people obviously get hurt by lies—and then the other cases where more or less everyone tends to lie and feels good about it, or sees no alternative to it. That’s why your book is so important—because people think it’s a good thing to tell so-called “white” lies. Saying “Oh, you look terrific in that dress,” even when you believe it is unattractive, is a “white” lie justified by not hurting the person’s feelings.

The example that came up in class yesterday was, do you want that mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-who’s-the-fairest-of-them-all device, or do you want a mirror that shows you what you really look like? Or imagine buying a car that came with a special option that gave you information that you might prefer to the truth: When you wanted to go fast, it would indicate that you were going even faster than you were. When you passed a gas station, it would tell you that you didn’t need any gas. Of course, nobody wants that. Well, then, why would you want it in your life in general?

The entire article is here.

The Shredder Ate My Culture Report: Five Questions the Barclays Board Should Have Asked

By Donna Boehme
Corporate Compliance Insights
Originally published on February 13, 2013


It’s been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad few weeks for Barclays.   Despite tough talk last month by new CEO Antony Jenkins about “Five New Values” (inviting any of its 140,000 employees who don’t want to sign up to head for the exits), the bad news just keeps on coming for the embattled firm.  And the latest round involves a shredder.

Last week’s headlines of “Shreddergate” and “Qatargate” spelled out the bank’s latest troubles.  In the former, Andrew Tinney, the chief operating officer of the bank’s high-end investment division, commissioned a “workplace culture report” from an outside consultancy, but was so horrified by its contents that he shredded the report on the spot at his Surrey estate and then, according to media reports,  “denied all knowledge of it ever having existed.” Neat trick, until an anonymous internal whistleblower emailed Jenkins a hint about the mysterious culture report.   Add to this the latest revelations about a Qatari cash injection at the height of the financial crisis that may have been funded by the bank itself, which means the bank may have lied to UK regulators.

Mind you, this is after an annus horribilis in which Barclays was hit by a half a billion dollar fine for its part in manipulating LIBOR, lost its Chairman, CEO and COO in quick succession, and saw its credit rating lowered by Moody’s from “stable” to “negative.”  The scandal ripples from that debacle continues, as the firm has just announced the exit of two more top execs: its finance chief and general counsel.

The entire article is here.

The Crazy Things That One Whistleblower Says Are Happening At JP Morgan Will Blow Your Mind

By Michael Snyder

Hawaii News Daily

Originally published March 16, 2012

Rampant silver manipulation? 

Rampant gold manipulation? 

Rampant LIBOR manipulation? 

Hiding MF Global client assets? 

These are all happening at JP Morgan according to an open letter reportedly written by an anonymous employee of the firm.  The whistleblower also warns of a "cascading credit event being triggered" by derivatives related to Greek government debt. 

Unlike Greg Smith at Goldman Sachs, this whistleblower has chosen to remain anonymous for now.  According to the letter, the whistleblower is still an employee of JP Morgan and has not resigned.  But that does make it much more difficult to confirm what he is saying.  With Greg Smith, we know exactly who he is and what he was doing at Goldman.  As far as this anonymous whistleblower is concerned, all we have is this letter.  So we must take it with a grain of salt.  However, the information in this letter does agree with what whistleblowers such as Andrew Maguire have said in the past about silver manipulation by JP Morgan.  And this letter does mention Greg Smith's resignation from Goldman, so we know that it must have been written in the past few days.  Hopefully this letter will cause authorities to take a much closer look at the crazy things that are going on over at JP Morgan and the other big Wall Street banks.

This anonymous letter was addressed to the CFTC, but unfortunately it looks like the CFTC has already chosen to ignore it.

The original letter from this anonymous whistleblower has already been taken down from the CFTC website.  When you go there now, all you get is this message....

"The Comment Cannot Be Found. Please Return to the Previous Page and Try Again."

Fortunately, there are many in the alternative media that copied this entire letter from the CFTC website.

The entire story is here.

A Little Deception Helps Push Athletes to the Limit

By Gina Kolata
The New York Times


The trained bicyclists thought they had ridden as fast as they possibly could. But Kevin Thompson, head of sport and exercise science at Northumbrian University in England, wondered if they go could even faster.

So, in an unusual experiment, he tricked them.

In their laboratory, Dr. Thompson and his assistant Mark Stone had had the cyclists pedal as hard as they could on a stationary bicycle for the equivalent of 4,000 meters, about 2.5 miles. After they had done this on several occasions, the cyclists thought they knew what their limits were.

Then Dr. Thompson asked the cyclists to race against an avatar, a figure of a cyclist on a computer screen in front them. Each rider was shown two avatars.

One was himself, moving along a virtual course at the rate he was actually pedaling the stationary bicycle. The other figure was moving at the pace of the cyclist’s own best effort — or so the cyclists were told.

In fact, the second avatar was programmed to ride faster than the cyclist ever had — using 2 percent more power, which translates into a 1 percent increase in speed.

Told to race against what they thought was their own best time, the cyclists ended up matching their avatars on their virtual rides, going significantly faster than they ever had gone before.

While a 2 percent increase in power might seem small, it is enough to make a big difference in a competitive event that lasts four to five minutes, like cycling for 4,000 meters. At the elite level in sports, a 1 percent increase in speed can determine whether an athlete places in a race or comes in somewhere farther back in the pack.

The improved times observed in his experiment, said Dr. Thompson, are “not just day-to-day variability, but a true change in performance.” And they give rise to some perplexing questions.

What limits how fast a person can run or swim or cycle or row? Is it just the body — do fatigued muscles just give out at a certain point? Or is the limit set by a mysterious “central governor” in the brain, as Timothy Noakes, professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, has called it, that determines pacing and effort and, ultimately, performance?

Until recently, exercise physiologists have mostly focused on the muscles, hearts and lungs of athletes, asking whether fatigue comes because the body has reached its limit.

But athletes themselves have long insisted that mental factors are paramount. Roger Bannister, the first runner to break the four-minute mile, once said: “It is the brain, not the heart or lungs that is the critical organ. It’s the brain.”

Now researchers like Dr. Thompson are designing studies to learn more about the brain’s influence over athletic performance.

The entire story can be read here.