Unconscious Processes Improve Lie Detection

The capacity to identify cheaters is essential for maintaining balanced social relationships, yet humans have been shown to be generally poor deception detectors. In fact, a plethora of empirical findings holds that individuals are only slightly better than chance when discerning lies from truths. H...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of personality and social psychology 2013-11, Vol.105 (5), p.721-739
Main Authors: Reinhard, Marc-André, Greifeneder, Rainer, Scharmach, Martin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ability
Adult
Cognitive Processes
Deception
Decision Making
Detection
Female
Human
Humans
Judges
Judgment
Judgment - physiology
Lie Detection
Lie Detection - psychology
Lying
Male
Personal relationships
Polygraphs
Social psychology
Social relations
Truth
Unconscious
Unconscious (Psychology)
Young Adult
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Summary:The capacity to identify cheaters is essential for maintaining balanced social relationships, yet humans have been shown to be generally poor deception detectors. In fact, a plethora of empirical findings holds that individuals are only slightly better than chance when discerning lies from truths. Here, we report 5 experiments showing that judges' ability to detect deception greatly increases after periods of unconscious processing. Specifically, judges who were kept from consciously deliberating outperformed judges who were encouraged to do so or who made a decision immediately; moreover, unconscious thinkers' detection accuracy was significantly above chance level. The reported experiments further show that this improvement comes about because unconscious thinking processes allow for integrating the particularly rich information basis necessary for accurate lie detection. These findings suggest that the human mind is not unfit to distinguish between truth and deception but that this ability resides in previously overlooked processes.
ISSN:0022-3514
1939-1315
DOI:10.1037/a0034352