Washington: When it comes to detecting deceit, your unconscious mind may be more accurate than conscious thought in pegging truth-tellers and liars, according to a new research.
The findings suggest that conscious awareness may hinder our ability to detect whether someone is lying, perhaps because we tend to seek out behaviours that are supposedly stereotypical of liars, like averted eyes or fidgeting.
However, those behaviours may not be all that indicative of an untrustworthy person, researchers said.
"Our research was prompted by the puzzling but consistent finding that humans are very poor lie detectors, performing at only about 54 per cent accuracy in traditional lie detection tasks," said psychological scientist and study author Leanne ten Brinke, postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business.
It is a finding that seems at odds with the fact that humans are typically sensitive to how others are feeling, what they're thinking, and what their personalities are like.
Along with UC Berkeley colleague Dayna Stimson and Berkeley-Haas Asst Prof Dana Carney, ten Brinke hypothesised that these seemingly paradoxical findings may be accounted for by unconscious processes. "We set out to test whether the unconscious mind could catch a liar - even when the conscious mind failed," she said.
The researchers first had 72 participants watch videos of "suspects" in a mock-crime interview. Some of the suspects in the videos had actually stolen a USD 100 bill from a bookshelf, whereas others had not.
However, all of the suspects were instructed to tell the interviewer they had not stolen the money. In doing so, one group of suspects must have been lying, whereas the other group must have been telling the truth.
When the 72 participants were asked to say which suspects they thought were lying and which were telling the truth, they were pretty inaccurate: They were only able to detect liars 43 per cent of the time, and truth-tellers only 48 per cent of the time.
