title: The ease of lying.
abstract: Brain imaging studies suggest that truth telling constitutes the default of the human brain and that lying involves intentional suppression of the predominant truth response. By manipulating the truth proportion in the Sheffield lie test, we investigated whether the dominance of the truth response is malleable. Results showed that frequent truth telling made lying more difficult, and that frequent lying made lying easier. These results implicate that (1) the accuracy of lie detection tests may be improved by increasing the dominance of the truth response and that (2) habitual lying makes the lie response more dominant.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. Bruno.Verschuere@ugent.be
authors.forename: Bruno
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Verschuere
authors.forename: Adriaan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Spruyt
authors.forename: Ewout H
authors.initials: EH
authors.lastname: Meijer
authors.forename: Henry
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Otgaar
mesh_terms: D008192:Deception; D006801:Humans; D008014:Lie Detection / Q000523:psychology; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time