With a little practice, one could
learn to tell a lie that may be indistinguishable from the truth.
New Northwestern University
research shows that lying is more malleable than previously thought, and with a
certain amount of training and instruction, the art of deception can be
perfected.
People generally take longer and
make more mistakes when telling lies than
telling the truth, because they are holding two conflicting answers in mind and
suppressing the honest response, previous research has shown. Consequently,
researchers in the present study investigated whether lying can be trained to
be more automatic and less task demanding.
This research could have
implications for law
enforcement and the administering of lie detector tests to better
handle deceptions in more realistic scenarios.
Researchers found that
instruction alone significantly reduced reaction times associated with
participants' deceptive responses.
They used a control group—an instruction group
in which participants were told to speed up their lies and make fewer errors,
but were not given time to prepare their lies—and a training group, which
received training in how to speed up their deceptive responses and were given
time to prepare their lies. In the training group that practiced their lies,
the differences between deceptive and truthful responses were completely
eliminated.
"We found that lying is more
malleable and can be changed upon intentional practice," said Xiaoqing Hu,
lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in the department of
psychology at Northwestern.
Hu said they were surprised that
even in the instruction group, members who were not given time to prepare their
lies and told only to try to speed up their responses and make fewer errors
were able to significantly reduce their deceptive response reaction time.
"This was really unexpected
because it suggests that people can be really flexible, and after they know
what is expected from them, they want to avoid being detected," Hu said,
noting the findings could help in crime fighting.
"In real life, there's
usually a time delay between the crime and interrogation," said Hu.
"Most people would have time to prepare and practice their lies prior to
the interrogation." However, previous research in deception usually gave
participants very little time to prepare their lies.
Lie detector tests most often
rely on physiological responses. Therefore, Hu said further research warrants
looking at whether additional training could
result in physiological changes in addition to inducing behavior changes as
observed in their study.
More information: "A Repeated Lie Becomes a Truth? The Effect
of Intentional Control and Training on Deception" was recently published
in Frontiers in Cognitive Science. www.frontiersin.or… 488/abstract
Provided by Northwestern
University
"Deception can be
perfected." December 6th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-deception.html
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