Disadvantages of lies

The truth will make you peaceful but finding it is not easy. We weave a complex network while trying to identify who is cheating. Nearly everyone, even those with experience dealing with deceivers, discover lies just by chance.

These conclusions stem from the first extensive analysis of individual differences in deception detection. Two psychologists Charles Bond Jr., Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and Bella DePaulo, University of California, Santa Barbara, said the analysis of the findings suggests that some people are more likely to express personality and more people. Other more mysterious.

According to the volunteer questionnaire, a person's trustworthiness is more important than honesty in whether or not that person is considered a liar. Psychologists evaluate the sincerity of some people in the first minute, whether they tell the truth or not. Previous studies have found that people with childish facial expressions seem to be trusted while those who look anxious or roll their eyes often experience untrustworthy marks.

This new work shows that volunteers often believe in liars, but they think it is more reliable than those who are honestly labeled untrustworthy.

The new investigation defies a view that psychologists Maureen O'Sullivan, University of San Francisco and Paul Ekman, University of California, San Francisco, say have a few people with significant experience in turning. bleaching liars can do that with high accuracy. O'Sullivan and Ekman have discovered that a minority of psychotherapists quickly find out whether a person lied about their feelings, or police officers quickly realized the deception involved in the crime. evil of the suspect.

O 'Sullivan said: ' People differ significantly in detecting the exact lie if you choose the right research object. '

The researchers applied this analytical tool to data from 142 experiments that discovered previous lies. In these surveys, 19,801 guesses assessed the honesty of 2,945 people giving true or false information. Many works only invite college students to make both guesses and liars, but only a few people with a lie investigation experience really judge the fraud related to their careers.

In general, participants who lie detectors average an average of 54%, while an average of 50% is predicted by accident. This data corresponds to what researchers already know.

But Bond and DePaulo focus on each person's performance, not the group average. They found that the most successful survey rate of a person in these works (about 75%) did not exceed the maximum rate that guessing was achieved. Individual differences for accuracy are quite small, with scores around the average of 54% correct.

Experienced people do not show an advantage over inexperienced people. These people also did not achieve higher accuracy in assessing powerful motivated liars, such as suspects, when compared to weaker engine liars, such as college students pretending to have hit. Stealing money.

Researchers also found that the tendency to label someone as a liar depends on whether they see other people as honest or not. Bond and DePaulo called for experiments to test the complexity of lie detection in real life. Outside the laboratory, people often deduce deception from a lot of information, not just transient behavior and words. In these cases, lies are determined over days, weeks or longer, rather than when people lie.

O 'Sullivan also recognizes the need for research aimed at these issues. But she still believes that some people, thanks to their professional experience, can quickly discover some kind of lie. In a new work awaiting publication, she and her colleagues found experienced police quickly realized high-risk lies of real suspects when they discovered less dangerous lies. of students.