Believe Liars When They Say They’re Lying
Believe Liars When They Say They’re Lying
December 16, 2013
Time Magazine — Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the University of Amsterdam asked 527 Dutch students – as part of a battery of psychology tests – how often they had told a lie in the past 24 hours. Forty-one percent said they had told none, 51 percent reported one to five fibs, and eight percent said they’d told six or more.
The scientists also broke down who was doing the lying. Previous research tended to average people’s reports of untruthfulness, which suggested that almost everyone lies regularly as a part of normal social interaction. However, in the current analysis, the scientific team found that only five percent of the people told 40 percent of the lies reported.
To delve deeper into lying patterns, the scientists also conducted two follow-up tests, in which a subset of the original group was given an opportunity to lie – without fear of discovery – in order to make more money. In one test, the participants were asked to roll a die repeatedly under a paper cup and report the total score. Only they could see the number, and the higher their score, the more they’d be paid.
In a second test, they were asked how many word puzzles they had solved successfully, and again, they were paid more for higher scores. The examiners had no way to verify their results, but they did include certain unsolvable words.
So while the investigators could not be absolutely sure who cheated on the first test, they were pretty sure that some of the participants lied, since there was no statistically possible way they could achieve some of the high scores they reported, given the number of unsolvable words thrown in.
“The interesting thing was that the more people reported they lied in the last 24 hours, the higher their reported die roll outcomes were,” says the co-author of the study, Dr. Shaul Shalvi of BGU’s Department of Psychology.
Read more on the Time Magazine website >>
Stories Like This
