Learn about why liars may mimic your body language; why “tend and befriend” is an alternative response to “fight or flight”; and why lakes freeze from the top down, not the bottom up.
Learn about why liars may mimic your body language; why “tend and befriend” is an alternative response to “fight or flight”; and why lakes freeze from the top down, not the bottom up.
Liars imitate the body language of the person they're lying to by Kelsey Donk
Instead of "Fight or Flight," Women Might "Tend and Befriend" by Reuben Westmaas
Why does a lake freeze from the top down, and not the bottom up? by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/liars-may-imitate-your-body-language
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why liars may mimic your body language; an alternative response to “fight or flight”; and why lakes freeze from the top down, and not the bottom up.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
What does your body language look like when you lie? According to a new study, it probably changes depending on who you’re talking to. Liars — specifically lying men — imitate the body language of the person they're lying to. And that could eventually mean we need a new type of lie detection test.
For this study, Dutch researchers recruited 50 male college students and gave each one five minutes to solve a wooden puzzle. The experimenter left the room, but she accidentally left the puzzle solution with the participant, subtly encouraging him to cheat on the puzzle. When the experimenter came back into the room, she asked the student not to tell on her for screwing up the experiment.
Next, the team equipped the student and a different researcher with wireless accelerometers to record their movements. The researcher then interviewed the student about what had just happened. Some students lied about how they’d solved the puzzle and others told the truth.
The team found that when a student was being honest, their body language was their own. But when they lied, they started to sync up their movements with the person they were talking to. The more difficult the lie, the more their movements synced with their interviewer.
Why would a lying person mimic the person they’re lying to? The researchers think that liars’ brains get so tied up with keeping their stories straight that they just mimic the listeners’ body movements. That’s easier, and requires less thought, than coming up with their own body language. In the past, researchers have tried — and failed — to find signs of a liar’s deception in their facial expressions or body language. But few had looked at both the liar and the person being lied to, together. That may be the key to detecting deception.
Unfortunately, you couldn’t use this to tell someone was lying just by looking at them. The movements we’re talking about here are too tiny. But they are detectable with the accelerometers the researchers used.
If the findings from this study can be duplicated in larger studies, we could have a new type of lie detector on our hands. The traditional lie detectors used in movies and police stations are notoriously unreliable. But imagine if we had accelerometers in the courtroom, able to detect the slightest, most subtle mimicry in peoples’ body language. That could be a game changer.
You’ve probably heard of the “fight or flight” response — that’s that feeling you might get when you’re stressed that makes you either want to get aggressive or withdraw completely. The fight-or-flight response is established by nearly a century of research, but it might not be our only response to stress. A more recent theory suggests that we also may “tend” and “befriend”.
The inspiration for this idea happened in the workplace: two UCLA psychology researchers noticed how the men and women in their lab responded to stress in different ways. When men were under pressure, they closed themselves in their offices; when the women were under pressure, they reached out to friends and colleagues. Curious, one of the researchers looked into the science — and realized that 90 percent of stress research had only used male subjects. What if what we know about stress is missing half of the population?
So, the researchers re-examined the science and zoomed in on the few studies that used female participants. What they found was a pattern of behavior that didn't closely resemble the flight-or-flight response at all. Women were more likely to react to stress with two other courses of action, which they called “tend and befriend.” The "tend" refers to things like checking in on vulnerable members of their community, especially children, and "befriend" refers to coordinating with members of their community to defend themselves and address the threat.
Of course, this isn’t exclusive to women — it soon became clear that men sometimes do this too. (It also doesn’t mean women don’t have a fight-or-flight response.) There is some evidence for a strong biological component. Fear triggers the production of oxytocin, sometimes called the "bonding hormone," in both men and women. But research suggests that testosterone suppresses the effects of oxytocin while estrogen enhances it. That might explain the gender difference.
The researchers see this different type of response as an evolutionary adaptation to ensure the survival of the species. But this doesn’t just extend to protection of your family and loved ones — tending and befriending could mean organizing a study group to prepare for an intense final exam, or hitting the group chat when you’re facing stress at work. When the going gets tough, you don’t have to attack or retreat. You can find connection, too.
In the colder parts of the world, lakes often spend the winter frozen — at least, mostly frozen. A lot of the time, it’s only the surface of the lake that turns to a sheet of ice, while the water below stays liquid. But heat rises — doesn’t it? So why do lakes freeze from the top down and not the bottom up?
First, the basics: From a scientific standpoint, heat is a measure of how fast the molecules in a substance are moving. When substances cool, their molecules slow down and get closer together — therefore, denser. Most substances follow this general rule.
Except for water. Water’s density doesn’t exactly work like that. Water is kinda weird.
In the freezing temperatures of winter, a lake gradually loses heat to the surrounding air through its surface. As the water on the surface cools, that colder, denser water sinks and allows warmer water to flow to the top. This keeps happening until the surface hits a magic temperature of 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit or 4 degrees Celsius.
That’s when water really starts acting strangely. Until this point, the water was getting cooler and cooler and denser and denser. But at this magic temperature and below, water starts expanding. So now, the colder water begins rising to the surface. The surface water keeps losing even more heat until it reaches 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 0 degrees Celsius — when it finally turns to ice.
This same principle is the reason why the deep ocean doesn’t freeze even though sunlight can’t reach it. There is a point, roughly 3,000 feet or 1,000 meters deep, called the thermocline [THER-mow-KLINE]. Water at this level and deeper reaches that magic temperature of 4 degrees Celsius. Water below this level would have to expand to either cool or warm — but the pressure of the water above is too great to let that happen. It only gets colder around 13,000 feet or about 4,000 meters. At that point, there’s so much pressure that the water stays liquid at temperatures that would usually turn it into ice.
If water didn’t behave this way, life as we know it wouldn’t be possible. Life started in the ocean, and that wouldn’t have happened if our oceans could freeze solid.
Water is weird in a way that you couldn’t live without.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Reuben Westmaas, and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow, and Ashley and I will tend and befriend you so hard… I mean. Or I guess you could just do it to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!