Platonic love etc

I found some interesting material on http://www.celebratefriendship.org but in some ways their point is no quite the one I would make. I completely agree with them that close friendship is undervalued compared to relationships based on sexual attraction. But I think they go a bit too far sometimes in extrapolating from there that relationships are superior if they exclude the sexual element completely.

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Body language

Lack of feedback is why people believe they are reliable character judges:

Manuals discriminate truth tellers from liars through numerous verbal and nonverbal behaviors, often linked to involuntary physiological responses. Partly contradicting this literature of interrogation expertise, experimental studies find that the short-term success rate of professional lie catchers—police officers, detectives, prison guards, customs officers, and the like—falls mostly in the 45% to 60% range, where 50% is the chance rate. In these experiments, professional lie catchers only differ from nonprofessionals in their high level of confidence! The professionals’ unwarranted confidence has been traced to lack of feedback in the workplace regarding the accuracy of their judgments and to their false reliance on behavioral signs of deceit, such as gaze aversion. In fact, behavioral signs of deceit differ across liars and constitute only a small effect.

(http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/jscope/arrigo03.htm)