I’m a forensic psychologist – you can tell if someone is lying with 80% accuracy using new ‘brain trick’
RESEARCHERS have developed a new method to identify lies – and it’s been right around 80 percent of the time.
The technique consists of paying attention to nothing other than the level of detail a person is providing you with.
This means you’re not placing focus on their mannerisms, shifty eye movements, and the like.
Instead, you’re only focusing on if they provide you with rich descriptions of their narrative – such as who was there, what happened, when the story occurred, and how it all went down.
By doing this, you can successfully catch a person in a lie 80 percent of the time, researchers from the University of Amsterdam found.
The fascinating research was detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature.
Numerous studies have concluded people are poor lie detectors by nature, therefore, this is an impressive find.
Research in 2021 that looked at 25,000 test subjects found that people guessed right in only 54 percent of cases – or just slightly better than chance, per Scientific American.
“We reasoned the truth may be found in simplicity and we propose to drop rather than add cues when trying to detect deception,” researchers of the new study said.
To test their hypothesis, the team developed a series of tests, in which 1,445 people were told to identify statements, transcripts, and interviews as true or false.
After assessing their answers, researchers found that the subjects who used intuition and other factors to identify lies barely performed better than random chance.
However, those who were instructed to focus solely on details provided in the accounts accurately identified truth and lies with a 59–79 percent accuracy.
“Our data show that relying on one good cue can be more beneficial than using many cues,” the researchers said.
The team dubbed their method the “use-the-best (and ignore-the-rest)” rule.
In turn, this helped the study participants ignore their own stereotypes of what a liar looks like.
Still, the researchers did acknowledge that a person lying may add details to their story to make it seem credible,
To combat that, they said the method should be used case-by-case, depending on context.