Читать книгу An Introduction to Intercultural Communication - Fred E. Jandt - Страница 119

People from nations and cultures around the globe pass through U.S. airports. In this case study, identify each of the steps of selection, organization, and interpretation. Identify the flawed assumptions.

In 2007, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) launched a program called Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) to identify potential terrorists at airports. The program was based on the Facial Action Coding System (Ekman & Friesen, 1978), which is a system of coding the movements of individual facial muscles. In the SPOT program, TSA behavior detection officers were trained to observe and interpret some 94 criteria that were assumed to be signs of stress, fear, or deception. According to a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO, 2013) publication, these were the steps:

1 Scan passengers in line and engage them in brief verbal exchanges while remaining mobile.

2 Identify passengers who exhibit clusters of behaviors indicative of stress, fear, or deception.

3 Identify passengers exhibiting behaviors that exceed SPOT point threshold for referral screening. (p. 10)

The TSA deployed thousands of behavior detection officers at about one-third of U.S. airports to scan security lines for certain behaviors. According to a document leaked by an anonymous source (Winter & Currier, 2015), these are some of the behaviors the officers were watching for:

 Too much yawning (+1 point)

 Whistling (+1 point)

 Widely open staring eyes (+2 points)

 Too much fidgeting (+1 point)

 Cold stare (+2 points)

 Rigid posture (+2 points)

 Appearing to be in disguise (+3 points)

 Being a woman over the age of 55 (−1 point)

 Being a man over the age of 65 (−1 point)

If a passenger was scored at 6 or more points, the passenger was sent to a pat-down and additional screening.

Behavior detection officers identified some 30,000 passengers each year for additional screening. Of those, only 1% were arrested for things such as drug possession or traveling with undeclared items. None were stopped for terrorism. The TSA has spent nearly $1 billion on the program.

In 2013, the GAO review of over 400 studies on lie detection concluded that the average person can detect lying only 54% of the time. From that, the GAO concluded there is not any scientific evidence to support that a TSA behavior detection officer can learn to detect a passenger who is “keeping a secret” and recommended limiting the SPOT program until the TSA can provide evidence that the program is useful.

The TSA responded that its SPOT technique uses a sequential combination of observation, situational awareness, logical analysis, and deception detection techniques to determine whether a passenger should receive additional screening and cited one study that indicates that SPOT is nine times more effective than randomly selecting individuals (L. Willis, 2011).