Do you believe that the more a person lies, the easier it is for them to continue lying?
Well, research has proven that our brains are better at telling the truth than lying, but repeated lying can overcome our mind’s need for veracity. At least, that is what NewScientist Health is reporting.
Neuro-imaging studies have shown that people’s brains have more activity when they are lying, suggesting that lying requires extra cognitive control. Bruno Verschuere, one conductor of this study and his colleagues from the University of Ghent in Belgium, found that frequent liars became better at lying the more they deviated from the truth.
Psychologist Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia stated, “Lie detector tests are most often used on people suspected of crimes, who have higher rates of psychopathic characteristics-including pathological dishonesty-than other individuals.” This gives the impression that at least some of the lie detectors may be relatively ineffective for practiced liars.
Ewout Mejier of Maastricht University in the Netherlands , purports, “ The findings implies that peppering a lie-detector test with simple questions designed to elicit a truthful response will strengthen the brain’s truth response, making it harder for someone to lie. This will increase the accuracy of such tests.”
Another interesting and prevalent article from World of Psychology , which we blogged on last week, suggests that deception is a part of a skilled criminal’s tool kit.
Canadian researchers conducted a study that set out to detect if someone was showing genuine remorse vs. displaying deceptive remorse. It is no secret that many criminal defenders seek to portray themselves as remorseful especially when it comes to defending themselves in court.
Researchers found that participants who were remorseful did not often swing from positive to negative emotions but usually passed through neutral emotions first. However, those who were deceptively remorseful had more direct transitions from positive to negative emotions and displayed fewer neutral emotions in the process.
It was noted in the experiment that microexpressions were not used to determine if a person was being genuine or not and that microexpressions were present in both groups.