The (Real!) Science Behind Fox's Lie to Me (2024)

If Fox's Fringe is full of junk science (including people who walk through walls and communicate with the dead), then Lie to Me, the network's newest law enforcement-themed drama, is just the opposite.

At the show's center is Cal Lightman (Tim Roth), a scientist whose expertise is detecting and interpreting "micro" expressions—involuntary facial expressions that last just a moment—a useful skill if you want to want to figure out whether someone's lying, and why. Lightman runs a consulting firm from which he and three supporting characters traverse the Washington, D.C., area solving mysteries for the police, FBI and pretty much any other client who needs a lie detector.

Lightman's character is based on that of clinical psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman. The Oakland-based scientist—whose books include Telling Lies, Emotions Revealed and Unmasking the Face—is an expert lie detector who's advised everyone from the Secret Service and the Department of Defense to Pixar on the science of reading facial expressions. Ekman's research indicates that our facial expressions for emotion are innate, universal and nearly impossible to conceal. From the U.S. to Japan, Africa and New Guinea, happiness, anger, surprise and despair trigger the same facial muscles. It's an idea that Darwin hypothesized but had been largely dismissed by scientists who, before Ekman's research, believed that facial expressions are culturally determined.

When we're lying about emotion—pretending to be happy when we're sad, for example—microexpressions can flash across our faces before we can get hold of them. And if most people aren't great at lying about their emotions perfectly, then it's also true that most people can't detect those little facial lies. That's where Ekman's consultancy comes in—his programs help train FBI and TSA agents to tell when someone is lying.

A very small percentage of people (less than 1 percent, according to Ekman) are natural lie detectors who can detect microexpressions and lies without being trained. The show takes this into account in the form of character Ria Torres (Monica Raymund), a "natural" whom Lightman recruits from the TSA in the show's pilot episode. In reality, Ekman does bring naturals (he likes to call them "wizards of deception detection") with him when he reviews tapes of investigation subjects.

Ekman acts as a scientific advisor on Lie to Me. But too often we've seen TV dramas hire "scientific consultants" only to jettison their suggestions for the sake of drama (think many of the TV shows that take place in a hospital). Lie to Me, Ekman assures PM, is different: He says the professional and scientific elements on the show are around 90 percent accurate. Although the character is based on what Ekman does, he is nothing like Lightman. "He's younger, edgier, arrogant, brusque, and he's English," says Ekman. "But the science that he does, and the applications, are exactly what I've been doing, particularly in the past five years, in applying this with law enforcement and national security."

If the show is 90 percent accurate, as Ekman claims, what about the other 10 percent? It turns out that PM won't have to fact-check every show (as we do Fringe and Lost), because Ekman is doing it himself. He'll have a blog on the show's website called The Truth About Lie to Me that will give a post-mortem of each episode, explaining nuances that the hour-long drama didn't have time to explore. He's also writing a free biweekly newsletter about the science behind the show: One differentiates lies, flattery, exaggeration and politeness, while another explains the problems with polygraph and fMRI lie-detection systems.

But in order to make sure that big mistakes don't make it onto the show, Ekman is involved with each episode's development. The show's writers go over ideas with him before they start an episode, and then send him a draft of the script when it's done. He tells them if anything's wrong, and also sends them a battery of video-clip notes, portraying facial expressions exactly for the actors to imitate. He says that it's been much more work than he anticipated. But if the show is informative and entertaining, the upside for Ekman will be huge: He has written 15 books, but just the first episode of Lie to Me will reach more people than even his most popular title.

"I'm enthusiastic about the show. It's more than met my expectations," Ekman says. But is he lying?

Probably not. Unlike Roth's Dr. Ligthman, who is both a master lie detector and a convincing liar, Ekman claims that he's a terrible liar. "We know from our research that the ability to catch a liar and the ability to lie successfully are totally unrelated," he says. "They rely on very different skills. And although I have been asked to train liars, I don't work that side of the street."