Although traditionally used to examine physiological responses, such as skin conductance and event related potentials, this paradigm has recently been used with response times to successfully discriminate “guilty” from “innocent” participants, with guilty participants taking longer to deny recognition of probes than irrelevant items. It has been argued, however, that such paradigms measure the possession of concealed knowledge rather than deception per se and therefore may not allow us to fully elucidate the distinct processes involved in responding to questions deceptively.
These findings have meant that recent cognitive models of deception have incorporated both the automatic activation of the truth and its resultant suppression as additional processes that contribute to longer response times for liars. For example, the Activation-Decision-Construction Model claims that following a question, relevant information (in particular, the truth) is automatically activated in long-term memory. This information is then made consciously available in working memory. In order to respond to a question deceptively, cognitive resources are required to inhibit the truthful response. Similarly, the Working Model of Deception highlights response inhibition as a pre-requisite to responding to a question deceptively.
While the need to suppress the truth is undeniably an important component of why lying is more difficult than telling the truth, there are several other reasons that have received less attention in the literature and that might also contribute.
Illustration: The Story of a Puppet, or: The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1892. Internet Archive via Wikimedia Commons. Author Carlo Collodi; translater Mary Alice Murray
The decision to lie
Assuming that people tell the truth by default, they must make a conscious choice to lie. The decision to lie is therefore likely to be an additional cognitive process associated with lying that takes time to execute. Indeed, current models of how we lie include a lie decision component. For example, the Working Model of Deception assumes that when an individual hears a question to which they may respond deceptively, executive control processes are used to determine the appropriate response (i.e., lie or truth), with a decision being made based on the likely risks and benefits involved. Similarly, the Activation Decision Construction Model Revised considers individuals who have previously decided to lie to particular questions and have rehearsed an answer. In these cases, the model states that a decision is still required because individuals must remind themselves of their decision to lie when that particular question is heard.
Despite the inclusion of decision components in the models, there is surprisingly little work that has specifically investigated how people make the decision to lie. This is perhaps because it is experimentally much easier to instruct people when to lie than to allow them to choose. We can find only a few papers that have investigated the decision process. The first of these presented participants with a selection of neutral questions and questions probing embarrassing information. Participants were instructed to lie to certain questions, such as those regarding their employment history, and tell the truth to others, such as those regarding what they did on Sunday morning. However, for general questions, they were instructed to answer truthfully unless a question probed embarrassing information about which they would normally lie to a stranger, in which case they should lie. In this condition, participants needed to decide themselves when to lie and when to tell the truth.
The experiment demonstrated that more time was needed to respond when individuals chose to lie compared with when they had been instructed, and both took longer than telling the truth, consistent with the idea that the decision of how to respond adds to cognitive processing load. However, it is difficult to be certain whether the elevated response times were due to the evaluation of whether a question was embarrassing or to the decision of how to respond.
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