I'm considering taking Ekman's microexpressions training because it's cheap in both time and money. Has anyone here taken it? Did it work for you? How do you know?
The course does seem to come with tests included (both before and after), but if anyone has any ideas for some cheap tests I can do before and after to see if it really works, I'd be happy to do those as well, and report the results. Cheap tests should cost me less than three hours total and less than $100 total.
Alternately, if enough people here have done it we could pool our "before" and "after" scores to independently verify whether there's an effect.
I have Ekman's training on my computer, and I quickly abandoned it. The low number of recommended training hours and low number of different training samples to me seemed an indication of poor quality. In addition, the only scientific study of efficacy I could find at the time was sponsored by a microexpressions company. Some other evidence I read elsewhere seemed to suggest that the lie-detection bump from microexpressions training was tiny, in the order of a few percentage points.
That said, it would be interesting to me to actually test the training.
We have two groups, one that get's Ekman's training and one that doesn't. We also have a group of liers. Let's say 5 people. Each person in both groups talks to each person in the group of liers. Each person in the group of liers tells the other people a consistent set of truths and lies. The people in the test groups record to each line if they think it's a truth or lie. They don't find out if they are wrong/right. After the training, both groups go through the process again. The set of truths and lies told is the same.
If the training group increased their accuracy significantly more than the control group, it worked. Of course, this method requires too much effort and isn't likely to be that accurate. Hm...
What is the smallest effect size you would be able to reliably detect with a test that small?