When it comes to spotting liars, Secret Service agents are the best in the business, scoring well above FBI and CIA agents, according to a study of law enforcement personnel and others.
"It was a bit of a surprise," said Maureen O'Sullivan of the University of San Francisco psychology department and one of those who conducted the survey, released Thursday."We sort of thought that people like the FBI and CIA agents who make their living detecting lying wouldn't do so poorly, and we certainly did not predict the Secret Service would do any better," she said.
O'Sullivan and Paul Ekman, director of the Human Interactions Laboratory at the University of California, San Francico, conducted the survey of 509 people, which also involved members of the National Security Agency, judges, police officers, federal polygraph operators and psychiatrists. The results were published in the current issue of The American Psychologist.