What If You Could See the Ugly Face Inside Everyone?

What If You Could See the Ugly Face Inside Everyone? One normal Tuesday, you start seeing a second face over everyone. A cartoon mask of whatever they're hiding: green for jealousy, red for anger, purple for selfishness. Liars, scammers and poker bluffers don't stand a chance. But then you see it over your mom. Over your best friend. And in the mirror. Would you want to see everyone's inner face, or would you rather not know? Tell us in the comments. 0:00 A party full of ugly faces 0:19 What if you could see the ugly face inside everyone? 0:24 The inner face 1:10 Micro expressions and lie detection 1:48 The human lie detector 3:16 What could go wrong? 4:08 Mom and Nia 4:47 The fundamental attribution error 5:27 The mirror 5:51 Everybody has ugly thoughts 6:32 Golden lights 8:08 Back at the party Science notes: the power is fiction, the science along the way is real. Micro expressions: very brief facial expressions, often lasting less than half a second, that can show a feeling someone is trying to hide. Studied for decades by psychologist Paul Ekman (Ekman and Friesen, "Nonverbal leakage and clues to deception", Psychiatry, 1969; Ekman, "Telling Lies", 1985). Lie detection: a review of 206 studies found people correctly sort truths from lies about 54 percent of the time, where chance is 50 percent (Bond and DePaulo, "Accuracy of deception judgments", Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2006). Fraud: the US Federal Trade Commission reported that consumers reported losing more than 10 billion dollars to fraud in 2023 (FTC press release, February 2024). Negativity bias: "Bad Is Stronger Than Good" (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer and Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 2001) reviews evidence that bad events, feedback and emotions tend to have a stronger effect on us than good ones. Fundamental attribution error: the tendency to explain other people's behavior by their character rather than their situation (named by Lee Ross, 1977). In Jones and Harris (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1967), people read essays for or against Fidel Castro and still judged the writers' true attitudes from them, even when told the writers had been assigned their side. Intrusive thoughts: in a study of 777 university students across 13 countries, about 94 percent reported at least one unwanted intrusive thought in the past three months (Radomsky and colleagues, Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, 2014). Kindness: in experiments by Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2022), people who did a small act of kindness underestimated how much the recipient appreciated it. #whatif #psychology #kindness #animation