Do Faces Lie? Ted Bundy and the Smiles of Strangers

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Was Cicero right to believe that our seeing others’ faces makes us privy to their minds? Can we look other people in the eye and tell whether they’re trustworthy, as George W. Bush did with Vladimir Putin? Can we see their smile as “something special” and be heartened to know that they show “genuine caring,” as Ann Rule believed about Ted Bundy? These presumptions capture the modern mythology of the face: that it can reveal the “authentic self” when words deceive, and if we can’t see the telltales clues in the face, then at least experts can. The Behavior Panel on YouTube, composed of the “world’s leading behavior experts” (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx_8ri2rYergbu_06VNSPlw), routinely decodes videos of politicians and celebrities to divine what they really meant by the way they avert their eyes, show facial twitches, sit straight or slump, and pause too little or too long when they speak.