Sex and Personality Traits Influence the Difference between Time Taken to Tell the Truth or Lie

Abstract

A necessary component of lying is the withholding of a truthful response. Hence, lying may be conceptualised as involving the inhibition of an initial, automatic response (the truth) while an alternative response (the lie) is generated. We investigated response times to visually and auditorially presented questions probing recent episodic memory, when subjects answered questions truthfully or with lies. We also investigated whether the absolute response times or difference between time taken to tell the truth or lie was affected by participants' sex or correlated with personality scores on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised-Short Scale. 61 subjects answered the same 36 questions five times. The first time involved answering all questions truthfully, which allowed post hoc analysis of whether subjects had been consistent in their lying and truth-telling on the following four occasions. These latter four occasions involved answering all questions (one each with 'truth' or 'lie') for both types of presentation. Regardless of type of presentation or subjects' sex, subjects took approximately 200 msec. longer to lie than to tell the truth in response to each question (p<.001). There were significant correlations between truthful response times to auditorially presented questions and Eysenck 'Neuroticism' scores. There was also a significant correlation for women between mean individual lie-minus-truth time to auditorially presented questions and Eysenck 'Lie' scores. These preliminary data suggest that response time is systematically longer when telling a lie and that personality variables may play a part in this process.

Reaction Times and Deception - the Lying Constant

“…In experiments where the task resembles ours here (that is, constant unelaborated Yes-No responses) the increase in RT for false responses is uniformly reported to be around 200-230 ms (Farrow et al, 2003;Walczyk. 2003, in Yes/No condition;Vendemia et al, 2005) Previous studies have not distinguished between Yes and No responses, and so have not found the interaction that is the most striking aspect of the results here.…”

“…That lying involves an increase in response time has, as noted in the introduction, been known for well over a century, and has been regularly confirmed in more recent studies (Dorward, 1999;Spence et al, 2001;Alban, 2003;Farrow et al, 2003;Vendemia et al, 2005). The reason for this is, however, in dispute.…”

“…Cody et al (1984) identified a number of vocal and verbal cues, of which response time was one, that could be used to tell liars from truth-tellers. Alternatively, Farrow et al (2003) suggest that the delay is due to the need to inhibit the natural response before producing the false one, that is, it requires a separate extra stage in the sequence of operations involved in generating the response. Our results are more in line with this suggestion, in that the extra time for false responses was found to be independent of the cognitive load for the basic calculation.…”

“…Thus lying appears to add a specific extra cognitive operation to the generation of the response, rather than increasing the overall cognitive load of the calculation itself. Farrow et al (2003) also claimed that the effect is independent of the mode of presentation (auditory or visual).…”

“…As other approaches to lie detection, such as physiological measures of arousal (Lykken, 1983;1984;Gale, 1988), or the analysis of social cues (Ekman and Friesen, 1974;DePaulo, Stone, and Lassiter, 1985;Miller and Stiff, 1993) were developed this performance method of lie detection fell into disuse (although neither alternative method has proved very reliable either.) Woodruff, 2001;Alban, 2003;Farrow, Reilly, Rahman, Herford, Woodruff & Spence, 2003;Walczyk, Roper, Seeman, & Humphrey, 2003;Vendemia, Buzan & Simon-Dack, 2005). The critical feature of the method is that subjects should be uncertain of the exact nature of a truthful response to a question, so they cannot prepare the response in advance and have to process the information in the question in real time as quickly as possible, so that there is a cognitive processing load combined with a time stress in the performance of the task.…”