Imagine going to the U.S. border with Mexico, and instead of talking to a border agent, you talk to a machine. It asks you questions like “What’s your full name” and “Are you a citizen of the United States.” All the while, the machine is monitoring different aspects of your behavior: how your eyes are moving, how your voice changes, how you pause between answers, how you fidget. Taking these markers together, the machine – called an Embodied Avatar kiosk – can determine whether or not you’re being truthful. This is the cutting edge of research in deception detection, which remains a surprisingly mysterious field, even though we’ve been building lie detectors for almost a hundred years.

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