Easier to spot a liar in a niqab, says study challenging Canada’s courtroom ban on Muslim veils
Easier to spot a liar in a niqab, says study challenging Canada’s courtroom ban on Muslim veils
By Tristin Hopper, National Post, July 1 2016
Two women clad in the niqab, a Muslim garment that covers all but the wearer’s eyes (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
In a landmark finding inspired by a Supreme Court ban on niqab-wearing court witnesses, a Canadian study has come to the surprising conclusion that it is actually easier to detect a liar if their face is veiled.
“There’s concrete data from over 500 people showing that, in fact, the courts were incorrect,” said Amy-May Leach, an associate professor at the Oshawa-based University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
Leach’s study, published in the latest edition of the journal of the American Psychological Association , had test subjects guess the truthfulness of women with and without religious veils.
The result? “Veiling actually improved lie detection.”
“People were focusing on what the women are saying, rather than what they look like,” said Leach.
In a 2013 ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada effectively levied a courtroom ban on the wearing of niqabs by testifying witnesses.
At issue was an Ontario sexual assault trial in which a 38-year-old woman alleged that two relatives had sexually assaulted her from a young age.
Identified only as N.S., the woman was denied a request to testify in her niqab. In the words of Ontario judge Norris Weisman, it would unfairly hide her “demeanour” during cross-examination.
“There is a deeply rooted presumption in our legal system that seeing a witness’s face is important to a fair trial,” read the Supreme Court decision upholding Weisman’s decision .
The charges agaist the two men were ultimately withdrawn when N.S. refused to testify with an uncovered face.
Leach’s study worked by taking female volunteers and showing them one of two videos featuring a woman and a backpack. In one video, a woman is shown vigilantly watching over a backpack. In the other, the woman is rifling through the backpack to steal its contents.
After the video, the volunteers are then led into a mock courtroom to be questioned by a “prosecution” and a “defence.” Whatever video they saw, the volunteer had to maintain that no theft took place. Thus, anybody who saw the “stealing” video was forced to lie.
People were focusing on what the women are saying, rather than what they look like
Trials were staged with volunteers having their heads uncovered, wearing a hijab (a Muslim hair covering) or wearing a face-covering niqab.
Videos of the trials were then played to a second set of volunteers who were asked to guess if the witness was telling the truth.
For unveiled women, witnesses spotted the liars at a rate of about 50 per cent — no better than if they had flipped a coin.
“It was only when witnesses wore veils (i.e., hijabs or niqabs) that observers performed above chance levels,” wrote the study.
Subsequent repeats of the experiment in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands found similar results.
An unidentified woman wears a niqab in Downtown Toronto. ( THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young )
I nterestingly, this went against what the veil-wearers themselves had suspected. Leach said that the religious garb gave participants a false sense of security that their lies would be believed, even though the opposite was the case.
Where it gets really strange is that Islamic face veils seem to be the only kind of face covering that turn people into bad liars.
In another study Leach has tested the effect of balaclavas on witnesses and found no discernible difference. Prior research has also tested the relative truth detection between a visible witness and one shielded behind a screen. There again, there was no discernible difference.
The burkha, a Muslin garment that covers a woman’s eyes with a fabric mesh, was not part of Leach’s study.
Before going into academia, Leach spent four years as an officer with the Canadian Border Services Agency, a job with the unique requirement to be able to detect liars.
Contrary to popular belief, Leach said there’s no “Pinocchio’s nose” indicator that border agents use to root out criminals. An agent would never send a traveller to secondary inspection because they looked up and to the right, for instance.
Rather, the best lie detection comes when a border agent can ask questions that trip up a liar. A good example is asking someone to recount their trip in reverse chronological order; easy for the honest traveler but panic-inducing for the smuggler who is trying to stick to a made-up itinerary.
Similarly, Leach suspected that niqab is better at outing liars for the simple fact that viewers are not distracted by smiles, raised eyebrows or other tics that aren’t actually that good at detecting a liar.
“It eliminates people’s reliance on incorrect cues,” said Leach.
What remains to be studied, however, is the minefield of potential biases opened up when a Canadian jury is faced with a complainant in a niqab.
Ample research has pointed to Westerners associating Muslim garb with aggression or deviousness. On the other hand, in sexual assault cases the bias might play to the advantage of a veiled complainant; given her obvious strict religious background it lends credence to the idea that she would not have stepped forward unless the accusations were true.
While Leach’s study found no evidence of discernible bias among volunteers, she noted that they’re all urban university students; a demographic unusually accustomed to seeing women in Muslim face coverings.
Leach said the plan now is to take the experiment to a wider demographic.
“Is this something that we’re going to find no matter who we test anywhere, or are some more likely to show this pattern of results than others?” she said.
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If it's easier to detect a liar, maybe ALL witnesses in court should be made to wear a niqab when they testify.
So John where are you? I post a positive article about Islam and you ignore it and still call me an Islamophobe.
What about the delicious Ramadan baking article? What about the Imams in Canada who are running deradicalization education? Where is John.....?
This is a positive article about Muslims? You could have fooled me.
Buzz I post a lot of articles that don't get many comments. So do other people.
And I'm not sure people care as much about what is going on in Canada as you do.
So good to see you again, John.
The strategies employed by debunkers [like requesting the trip details in reverse chronological order] can be used on women who wear niqabs or those that don't wear them .