The Huffington Post: Think you’re adept at calling someone’s bluff? Convinced you can spot a liar from halfway across the room? You’re probably wrong, says a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. According to the research, led by psychologist Aldert Vrij of the University More
One of my guilty pleasures is the long-running TV show NCIS, a drama focused on the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The hero is a former Marine, now Special Agent Jethro Gibbs, a disciplined detective with an uncanny ability to observe and interrogate criminal suspects. He doesn’t say much or display More
MSNBC: We all know that smiling faces sometimes tell lies, even without the Motown song there to remind us. But now there’s proof that those fake smiles may not be worth as much as the genuine article. In a study conducted at Bangor University in Wales, researchers had 36 undergrads More
Legal systems are necessary in any functioning society. Centuries ago, people realized that the only way to maintain a peaceful community was to develop a firm set of rules—laws—to punish transgressors. As laws have continued to evolve in societies around the world, psychological scientists have begun to investigate the psychological More
Unlike Pinocchio, liars do not usually give telltale signs that they are being dishonest. In lieu of a growing nose, is there a way to distinguish people who are telling the truth from those who aren’t? A new report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the More
In its war on terror, the U.S. government uses handheld lie detectors for fast screening of terrorism suspects. It has been shown that the pocket polygraphs have high error rates and are susceptible to successful faking, so the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) was developed as an alternative lie detection More
