When specific gestures are associated with specific meanings and presented as scientific, it becomes part of the pseudoscience. Scientists can codify certain behaviors to better understand communication, but they can't be used to code.
The public thinks that detecting who is lying and who is telling the truth is the best thing to do. It is not the case. A study from the University of Portsmouth in 2020 asked people to identify smuggler in videotaped ferry crossing, but only 39.2 percent of them did so.
In his September 2020 video about Amber Heard, Portenier films himself laughing, smirking, and rubbing his face in disbelief as he claims that her snacking on food and seeming unenthused is not a good indicator for her being the victim. It is a good indicator of her being an abusive person. Portenier says he probably spoke a little strongly in the video but would be a little bit more mellow if he made it now. He agrees with Denault about the dangers of pseudoscientific analysis.
He says that it is something that concerns him, that it is easy to claim that you know things on the internet. Portenier took some psychology classes at the university, but his knowledge of body language is mostly self-taught. He says he has been studying the topic for a decade and has been watching videos by former FBI agent Joe Navarro. Microexpressions are facial expressions that last for a fraction of a second and are difficult to hide. Ekman admits that microexpressions that reveal concealed emotions aren't all that common, and academics note that he has not published data proving that microexpressions can be used to detect lies.
Bruce Durham, a 41-year-old from England who made a video showing the "Exact Moment" of the wedding of the couple, is self-taught. Durham has been working in performance coaching for more than 20 years. Durham says that he has had thousands of hours sitting in front of people. You can quickly develop trends and analysis when you spend a lot of time looking at people. Believing Bruce has over 200,000 subscribers.
Portenier and Durham both stress that they are not experts in their field, and that they try to communicate the limitations of what they do to the audience. A lot of people look for who is lying and who isn't, but you can't really tell that. Durham claims that they fall into two categories of looking comfortable and uncomfortable, and that he has clips of the nose of Disney's 1940 film to show how uncomfortable they are. Durham admits that he makes his video titles more provocative in order to get more clicks, but he says that identifying when someone looks uncomfortable is not a conclusion in itself. He argues that he always starts or ends his videos with the phrase, "You need to be fair and balanced." I say that many times as well.
