Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 20, Issue 3, September 2011, Pages 908-911
Consciousness and Cognition

Short Communication
The ease of lying

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2010.10.023Get rights and content

Abstract

Brain imaging studies suggest that truth telling constitutes the default of the human brain and that lying involves intentional suppression of the predominant truth response. By manipulating the truth proportion in the Sheffield lie test, we investigated whether the dominance of the truth response is malleable. Results showed that frequent truth telling made lying more difficult, and that frequent lying made lying easier. These results implicate that (1) the accuracy of lie detection tests may be improved by increasing the dominance of the truth response and that (2) habitual lying makes the lie response more dominant.

Introduction

Brain imaging studies on deception show that (1) lying is associated with activity in prefrontal brain regions (anterior cingulate, dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior frontal regions) that are critically involved in cognitive control, and (2) no area of the brain is systematically more active for truth telling than for deception (Christ et al., 2009, Spence and Kaylor-Hughes, 2008). These findings suggest that the truth constitutes the default of the human brain, and that lying involves intentional suppression of the predominant truth response. A long standing question is whether the truth is always the dominant response or whether deception may constitute the default in habitual or pathological liars (Dike et al., 2005, Grubin, 2005, Yang and Raine, 2006, Yang et al., 2007). The present study is the first to examine whether the dominance of the truth response is malleable. This investigation also has important applied implications for lie detection: Malleability would suggest that the dominance of the truth response can be enhanced, thereby improving the diagnostic accuracy of lie detection.

Section snippets

Method

We examined whether response latencies and accuracy for truthful and deceptive answers to a critical set of questions in the Sheffield lie test (Fullam et al., 2009, Spence and Kaylor-Hughes, 2008, Spence et al., 2008, Spence et al., 2001) were affected by a set of filler questions that either required a truth response or a lie response. Therefore, undergraduate students were randomly assigned to the frequent truth (n = 21), the frequent lie (n = 22), or the control condition (n = 20). They either

Results

The data of the filler trials were discarded.2 Both the error rates and the response latencies of the test trials were analyzed by means of a 2

Discussion

Assessing cognitive complexity with response latencies and accuracy (Donders, 1868/1969), the results of the control condition replicate previous research by showing that lying is more difficult and comes with a cognitive “cost”: Lying is slower and less accurate compared to truth telling (for a review see Verschuere & De Houwer, 2011). Critically, truth proportion affected behavioural responding in the Sheffield lie test: Frequent lying made lying easier whereas frequent truth telling made

Acknowledgments

Bruno Verschuere and Adriaan Spruyt are Postdoctoral Fellows of the Scientific Research Foundation – FWO. Preparation of this paper was supported by Grants BOF/GOA2006/001 and BOF09/01M00209. We would like to thank Helen Tibboel and Bram Van Bockstaele for their aid in collecting the data.

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