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As is typical for this type of psychology research, they did the experiment by asking a bunch of psychology undergrads to role play as liars or truth tellers af

As is typical for this type of psychology research, they did the experiment by asking a bunch of psychology undergrads to role play as liars or truth tellers after performing specific tasks, not by testing it on people found to be lying in the real world (which would obviously be quite difficult). This means that without further research, it's not clear whether it actually applies to other groups of people or scenarios. For example, in this experiment, it seems like they specifically gave the people selected as liars an "outline" of the task that they didn't do to base their cover story on. It seems like this could also just show that trying to use something made up out of whole cloth is a simply a very bad strategy for lying compared to using details you have actually experienced (for example, if they had the test subjects perform BOTH tasks and had them lie about only the second task but use the details they remember from the first task for the second task, would this lie detection technique really have worked?) This isn't to say that this type of experiment is bad, since it would be very hard to test this type of lie detection technique otherwise, but it is probably premature to report on it based on one experiment until it has been replicated in other experiments.

dinfinity 2y ago
Add to that that there was absolutely nothing on the line for the subjects. No life in prison, no jail time, no fine, no loss of social status, just nothing. Nervous or stressed people can say wildly inaccurate things and seem like they're lying, even if they technically have nothing to hide. Tell these people that if they give more detailed descriptions of what happened they're more likely to be seen as telling the truth and I can only see the number of times they misspeak or just confabulate go up.

dinfinity 2y ago

Add to that that there was absolutely nothing on the line for the subjects. No life in prison, no jail time, no fine, no loss of social status, just nothing. Nervous or stressed people can say wildly inaccurate things and seem like they're lying, even if they technically have nothing to hide. Tell these people that if they give more detailed descriptions of what happened they're more likely to be seen as telling the truth and I can only see the number of times they misspeak or just confabulate go up.