http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/science/in-airport-screening-body-language-is-faulted-as-behavior-sleuth.html?_r=0
The article, "At Airports, a Misplaced Faith in Body Language," by John Tierney, discusses that airport security screeners like to think that they can read body language, but they really can't. The Transportation Security Administration has spent about a billion dollars, training thousands of people who work at the airport, to recognize some common signs of lying. For instance, certain facial expressions and looking upward were taught as common signs of lying. However, despite these efforts to stop terrorists, no evidence has been seen to say that this is an effective program. Even the upward eye rolling is not a sign of lying as studies have recently shown. Experiments have also shown that many people can't tell liars from innocent people. Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at The University of Chicago states, "Body language speaks to us, but only in whispers." Some professors still do believe that liars can be recognized in high stakes situations. They state that laboratory experiments have failed in the past because people were forced to lie about things that didn't matter to them. However, actual liars show more stress in real life situations. Despite this though, the T.S.A still has to prove that their program for recognizing liars, is effective.
Basically all of society can relate to this article. Millions of people take flights out of different airports around the globe every day. There have also been numerous stories in the news about terrorists, hijacked planes, and bomb threats in airports. Even though this article would not put a person at ease about taking a flight, it's important to know what steps the T.S.A has taken to address these problems, even though some of the steps, like trying to identify liars has not been effective yet.
This article was very well written. It gave many examples of why the billion dollar program the T.S.A has been using, has not worked. I also liked how they stated, that despite this, there still might be a way to identify liars in airports. If this was true, it would cause many people taking flights, less stress.
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This was a very interesting article. It really makes one wonder whether or not the TSA’s are methods actually work. I liked how you talked about how this is a huge amount of money that is being used for the training for this lie detection and if it is not actually having an impact on the safety of passengers then why should money be spent on that training instead of other methods.
ReplyDeleteYou said that these methods do not work but it seems based off the article it was more that the methods haven’t been proven to work but they may work. It also said that there may have been flaws in the testing of the effectiveness of this training.
I thought this article was so interesting and raised questions about the effectiveness I had always assumed worked. It does raise some concerns about if the TSA can actually prevent certain terrorists from entering our planes.