Thursday, August 16, 2007

TSA agents watch suspicious body language

"New airport agents have been trained to check for bad intentions in travelers' facial expressions...

...At the heart of the new screening system is a theory that when people try to conceal their emotions, they reveal their feelings in flashes that Ekman, a pioneer in the field, calls ''micro-expressions."

Reading this piece, I was struck by a number of thoughts:

1. How this ties into racial profiling, but that has nothing to do with this blog so forget that.

and

2. Being the ad man that I am, I can't help but see some potential in putting these same systems to work in ad testing. We rely a lot on verbal reactions in research, when in fact it's our nonverbal reactions to commercials that convey our real disgust (say to a typical radio commercial in Dubai) or appreciation (to those Melody Tunes ads for example).

So TSA, where do I sign up?


(credit: Miami Herald)

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