Short CommunicationThe ease of lying
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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