Who’s the best person to protect you against computer hackers? Or advise you on impenetrable security? You might think about hiring a hacker or a thief. What about if you want to find a good lie-detector? Likewise, you may want to seek out the best liar you can find. Researchers from Birkbeck, University of London have shown that people who can more accurately tell when they are being lied to, tend to be better liars too.
Previous research has shown that in general, people are only just a little better than chance at correctly judging when they are being lied to. This is even true for people you’d expect to be better than average, such as policemen and judges.
The Birkbeck scientists developed a competitive experimental ‘game’ called DeceIT (standing for Deceptive Interaction Task). Normal people volunteered and took turns lying and telling the truth to each other, while everybody else in the group would judge whether they were lying or telling the truth. To motivate players, high-value prizes were given to the most successful liars and lie-detectors.
By getting the same people to act as liars and judges in a competitive, highly motivated face-to-face setting, the researchers were able to compare individual players and found that as peoples’ ability to tell lies convincingly increased, so did their ability to accurately detect lies being told to them. What’s more, good liars are rightly more confident that they would be believed than bad ones.
Dr Geoff Bird, who supervised the research, said: “Detecting when somebody else is lying is incredibly hard and most people are useless at it. However, our research suggests that there may be a small percentage of people who are really good at both working out when somebody else is lying and also really good at lying themselves. The question now is to work out why they are so good. ”
Gordon Wright, the PhD student supported by an Economic and Social Research Council studentship, who led the research, said: “Deception is all around us, all the time, often polite or well-intentioned, but sometimes downright malevolent. Our results indicate there are people out there who do both of these very difficult things really well; they can accurately tell whenever they are being lied to, then turn around and lie with impunity, and they know they can too! Not only may this research have applications in the legal and criminal systems, such as the development of more reliable deception detection technologies, it may also enable identification of threats more accurately as we will know the behaviours to look out for.”
Further information
The paper was published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. A PDF of the provisional article is available on the website.
The researchers make the point that the ability to deceive others, and the ability to detect deception, have long been proposed to confer an evolutionary advantage. In other words, if you can cheat, you can prosper!? Deception detection has been studied extensively by scientists, and the finding that typical individuals fare little better than chance in detecting deception is one of the more robust in the behavioural sciences.
