The unconscious mind can detect a lie, although the conscious cannot

Contents

• Unconsciously detect deception
• Unconscious thinking tests
• We are good at detecting lies
  • References

Unconsciously detect deception

A study reveals that the conscious mind can hinder our ability to detect lies ...

The researchers found that when it comes to detecting deception, automatic feelings can be more accurate than conscious thinking in helping human beings differentiate truths from lies, since we intuitively know how to perfectly read the signs that reveal the truth. lie.

The results, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggest that awareness can hinder our ability to detect if someone is lying. This could be because humans tend to look for the supposedly stereotypical behavior of liars, such as restlessness, or when people avoid eye contact. However, such behavior may not be all that an untrustworthy person indicates..

However, these behaviors may not be entirely indicative that a person is not trustworthy, as Leanne Brinke, the author of a new lie detection research study, asserts: "Our research was motivated by the puzzling but consistent finding of that humans are very poor lie detectors, hitting only 54% accuracy in traditional lie detection tasks. "

These results are not better than those that we would give a random answer, since we have statistically speaking, a 50% chance of getting it right. therefore, this is a finding that seems to disagree with the fact that human beings tend to be sensitive to the feelings of others, what they are thinking, etc..

The hypothesis put forward for the study was that these apparently paradoxical results can be explained by unconscious processes. As Brinke argues, "We set out to test whether the unconscious mind can catch a liar, even though the conscious mind cannot.".

It may interest you: 10 ways to catch a liar

Unconscious thinking tests

The researchers selected 72 participants whom they had to watch videos of "suspects" in a mock interview. Some of the suspects had actually stolen a $ 100 bill from a book shelf, while others had not. However, all of the suspects were instructed to tell the interviewer that they had not stolen the money. Thus, one group of suspects was lying, while the other group was telling the truth..

When the participants were asked to tell who they suspected was lying and who was telling the truth, the answers were quite inaccurate: they were only able to detect the liar 43% of the time, and who was telling the truth in the 48% of the time.

The experimenters, however, also gave the participants an unconscious thinking test. They were shown a series of words, some of them associated with lies and others associated with the search for the truth..

What they found was that the participants showed an unconscious association between deception-related words and suspects who had been detected as liars..

Similarly, words related to the truth were unconsciously associated with the suspects who had been telling the truth.

In the unconscious test, therefore, the participants obtained much better results than in the consciously test.

We are good at detecting lies

These findings challenge the traditional view of humans as poor lie detectors:

"Across two experiments, indirect measures of deception detection accuracy were superior to traditional and direct measures, providing strong evidence for the idea that although humans cannot consciously report who is lying and who is telling the truth, somewhere less conscious, they recognize when someone is lying ".

The question then is: if at some level we know when people are lying, how can we access this information??

We do not know it yet…

Mythomania: the pathological lie

References

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140324104520.htm