Unconscious processes improve lie detection.

Abstract

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.

Adolescents gradually improve at detecting trustworthiness from the facial features of unknown adults

“…Trustworthiness detection is not always accurate Vogt, Efferson, & Fehr, 2013), and it is in fact better when information is limited or participants are distracted (Manson, Gervais, & Kline, 2013;Reinhard, Greifeneder, & Scharmach, 2013;Sylwester, Lyons, Buchanan, Nettle, & Roberts, 2012). That is, trustworthiness detection appears to improve when people do not consciously try to assess trustworthiness.…”

Saving face? When emotion displays during public apologies mitigate damage to organizational performance

“…These cues need not be obvious to have a dramatic effect; even brief emotional leakages impact naïve observers' perceptions and evaluations (Stewart et al, 2009). Taken together, this research demonstrates that observers are actually aware of accurate behavioral cues to deception and that this knowledge influences interpersonal impressions (Reinhard, Greifeneder, & Scharmach, 2013;Sporer & Masip, 2012;ten Brinke, Stimson, & Carney, 2014). In the context of public corporate apologies, deviant emotional displays by the apologizer seem to similarly induce negative reactions toward the apologizing representative's organization.…”

Can Ordinary People Detect Deception After All?

“…Patients who have damage to speech comprehension areas of the brain and therefore are hampered in using oral cues bested healthy observers' lie detection accuracy (60% versus 47%, respectively) [41]. Related to this, an unconscious thought paradigm [42] where people are kept from consciously deliberating during [47] the time between them receiving others' communications and when they are instructed to make veracity judgments improves lie detection accuracy by 11% to 32% relative to actively deliberating about the lie detection decision [43].…”