We have all agonised over an important decision, only to go with our ‘gut’ instinct.
And now a new study suggests that our initial, gut reaction is better at identifying a liar than our conscious mind.
Researchers found that when it comes to detecting deceit, automatic feelings may be more accurate than conscious thought in helping humans sort truths from lies.
The findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggest that conscious awareness may hinder our ability to detect whether someone is lying.
This could be because humans tend to seek out behaviour supposedly stereotypical of liars, such fidgeting or when people avoid making eye contact. However, such behaviour may not be all that indicative of an untrustworthy person.
‘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 lead author of the study, Leanne ten Brinke, of the University of California.
She explained that the level of accuracy is hardly better than chance, as if participants were simply guessing whether the person was lying.
The finding seems at odds with the fact that people are typically sensitive to how others are feeling, what they are thinking and what their personalities are like.
In the experiment, researchers made 72 people watch videos of ‘suspects’ in a mock-crime interview. Some of the suspects in the videos had ‘stolen’ a $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.
When the 72 participants were asked to say which suspects they thought were lying and which were telling the truth, they were only able to detect liars 43 per cent of the time and those telling the truth only 48 per cent of the time.
However, the researchers also used behavioural reaction time tests – one of which is called the Implicit Association Test (IAT) – to probe participants’ more automatic instincts towards the suspects.
Results showed that participants were more likely to unconsciously associate deception-related words – such as ‘untruthful’, ‘dishonest’, and ‘deceitful’ with the suspects who were actually lying.
At the same time, the participants were more likely to associate truthful words – such as ‘honest’ or ‘valid,’ with the suspects who were actually telling the truth.
A second experiment suggests that people may have some intuitive sense, outside of conscious awareness, that detects when someone is lying.
