GYre0ePJhZ Posted March 30, 2014 Share Posted March 30, 2014 Stef talks a lot about trusting your gut and then often refers to Gladwell's Blink which proposes that "spontaneous decisions are often as good as, or even better than, carefully planned and considered ones". A study published two weeks ago reinforces such a notion. From http://www.bps.org.uk/news/our-subconscious-mind-may-detect-liars: A team at the University of California, Berkeley asked 72 people to watch videos of 'suspects' being interviewed for a mock crime. Some had stolen money from a shelf, while others had not, but all were instructed to say on the clip that they had not taken the cash. It was found that the participants could only detect liars 43 per cent of the time and truth-tellers 48 per cent of the time. However, when the researchers used behavioural reaction time tests to assess automatic instincts, the participants typically associated deception-related words with the liars and truthful words with the truth-tellers. The Abstract of the study: To maximize survival and reproductive success, primates evolved the tendency to tell lies and the ability to accurately detect them. Despite the obvious advantage of detecting lies accurately, conscious judgments of veracity are only slightly more accurate than chance. However, findings in forensic psychology, neuroscience, and primatology suggest that lies can be accurately detected when less-conscious mental processes (as opposed to more-conscious mental processes) are used. We predicted that observing someone tell a lie would automatically activate cognitive concepts associated with deception, and observing someone tell the truth would activate concepts associated with truth. In two experiments, we demonstrated that indirect measures of deception detection are significantly more accurate than direct measures. These findings provide a new lens through which to reconsider old questions and approach new investigations of human lie detection. Link to the study: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/19/0956797614524421.abstract Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dylan Lawrence Moore Posted March 30, 2014 Share Posted March 30, 2014 Reminds me of Truthsayers from the Dune series. I wonder how much effort it would take to figure out how to actively train in "truth/falsehood detection" as a skill? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GYre0ePJhZ Posted March 31, 2014 Author Share Posted March 31, 2014 Reminds me of Truthsayers from the Dune series. What are those and in what way do they remind you of them? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dylan Lawrence Moore Posted March 31, 2014 Share Posted March 31, 2014 What are those and in what way do they remind you of them? Dune is sci-fi meets sociology, by the way. The truthsayers are people who are naturally able to tell if someone is lying. The only way to fool them is to actively keep yourself away from specifically knowing something. At one point in the series a truthsayer describes her ability simply by saying that she knew someone was lying because she had the desire to turn her back on the person. That's what reminded me of the study. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GYre0ePJhZ Posted March 31, 2014 Author Share Posted March 31, 2014 That's interesting. I think many protect themselves from knowledge so they don't have to take responsibility. There are a lot of gems in sci-fi. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Prairie Posted March 31, 2014 Share Posted March 31, 2014 I wonder how much effort it would take to figure out how to actively train in "truth/falsehood detection" as a skill?Or rather regain the skill that was pounded out of one in childhood when having to believe the endless parental lies? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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