یک دقیقه طول می کشد تا یک مطلب را بدانم: رابطه تشخیص دروغ و اختلالات فکری و روانی

We investigated primary and secondary psychopathy and the ability to detect high-stakes, real-life emotional lies in an on-line experiment (N = 150). Using signal detection analysis, we found that lie detection ability was overall above chance level, there was a tendency towards responding liberally to the test stimuli, and women were more accurate than men. Further, sex moderated the relationship between psychopathy and lie detection ability; in men, primary psychopathy had a significant positive correlation with the ability to detect lies, whereas in women there was a significant negative correlation with deception detection. The results are discussed with reference to evolutionary theory and sex differences in processing socio-emotional information.

Decades of research in the field of lie detection have argued against the notion that most people are better than chance at identifying liars (e.g., Bond & DePaulo, 2008). However, major disagreement still exists as to whether there are individual differences in lie detection ability and, if so, what individual characteristics may associate with greater accuracy (Bond and Uysal, 2007 and O’Sullivan, 2007). For example, Bond and DePaulo (2008) conducted a meta-analysis on several studies, and found that people showed little variation in deception detection accuracy, casting doubt on the existence of lie detection wizards (O’Sullivan and Ekman, 2004). Nevertheless, there may be yet undiscovered individual characteristics that enhance deception detection (Baker, ten Brinke, & Porter, 2013). In this respect, an especially relevant domain of individual differences across people is the ability to make decisions and judgments based on the identification and recognition of emotions in others (O’Sullivan, 2005). Social intelligence (e.g., emotional intelligence and Theory of Mind) relate to increased emotion recognition ability (Mier et al., 2010 and Petrides and Furnham, 2003). Individuals with high social intelligence are expected to have enhanced capacity to detect emotional cues in faces, presumably leading to superior lie detection ability (O’Sullivan, 2005). For example, Sylwester, Lyons, Buchanan, Nettle, and Roberts (2012) found that higher scores on a Theory of Mind measure had an association with enhanced accuracy of detecting co-operators in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. However, social intelligence may also relate to more compassionate reactions to emotional lies, thus hindering the ability to detect emotional deception (Baker et al., 2013). Rather than improving lie detection, perhaps the ability to perceive emotions in others is related to higher gullibility, or the tendency to rate liars as being truthful. It is possible that individuals who are low in emotional intelligence may be less detracted by hot emotional messages, and be more able to concentrate on cold cues that will aid in accurate detection ( Peace & Sinclair, 2012). One way to measure emotional intelligence is via psychopathy, a trait characterised by low emotional intelligence and empathy ( Ali et al., 2009, Jonason et al., 2013, Malterer et al., 2008 and Wai and Tiliopoulos, 2012). Here, we were interested in investigating whether individual differences in psychopathy were associated with differences in the ability to detect deceptive, high-stake emotional lies. Although psychopathy has been widely researched in relation to lie production (Giammarco et al., 2013, Klaver et al., 2009 and Porter et al., 2011), not many have looked at the role of psychopathic traits in deception detection. The link between psychopathy and higher levels of self-reported lying (Giammarco et al., 2013), as well as lie production and deception detection ability (Wright, Berry, & Bird, 2012), suggests that high psychopathy should be correlated with better lie detection ability. Interestingly, the few studies that have investigated this link have reported null results (Martin and Leach, in press and Peace and Sinclair, 2012), although methodological limitations may account in part for this; Peace and Sinclair (2012), for instance, used written narratives, which have potentially low ecological validity (O’Sullivan, 2008). Furthermore, previous studies have not made a distinction between the sub-facets of psychopathy (i.e., primary and secondary), which can be quite different in their manifestations and aetiologies (McHoskey, Worzel, & Szyarto, 1998). The two sub-facets of psychopathy relate to inter-personal and affective deficits (viz., primary psychopathy), and anti-social impulsivity (viz., secondary psychopathy), respectively (McHoskey et al., 1998). Primary psychopaths are more likely to achieve success in the business world, whereas secondary psychopaths are more likely to populate prisons (Gao & Raine, 2010). These sub-facets are also slightly different in terms of emotional processing, primary psychopaths having weaker empathic responses (Seara-Cardoso, Neumann, Roiser, McCrory, & Viding, 2011) and more accurate perception of fearful faces (Del Gaizo & Falkenbach, 2008) than secondary psychopaths. Therefore, we anticipate that primary psychopathy, but not secondary psychopathy, will be associated with better deception detection ability. It has been suggested that rather than being maladaptive, psychopathy could be a cheater-strategy, a specialisation for exploiting a specific social niche (Bergmüller et al., 2010 and Glenn et al., 2011). The exploitive inter-personal style of primary psychopaths could make them adept in achieving high societal positions (Boddy, 2006), which could be aided by both enhanced lie detection and lie production capacity. Furthermore, psychopathy seems more like a male-typical trait (Cale & Lilienfeld, 2002), facilitating mating-related success in high psychopathy men (Jonason, Li, Webster, & Schmitt, 2009). Interestingly, primary psychopathy is manifested differently between the sexes, for example, via links between low empathy and high psychopathy in men, but not in women (Jonason et al., 2013). Low empathy could be a fitness-increasing adaptation for men, but not necessarily for women, who are high in primary psychopathy. We would expect that if high primary psychopathy is a male-typical adaptation for exploiting others, high psychopathy men would benefit more from enhanced lie detection ability. Secondary psychopathy, in turn, relates to deficits in decision making (Dean et al., 2013), and is less likely to be a heritable trait (Mealey, 1995). Hence, we expect that irrespective of participant sex, secondary psychopathy either relates to impaired lie detection, or has no relationship with lie detection at all. The present study aims to add to the existing literature by investigating the role of primary and secondary psychopathy in detecting deception in real-life, high-stakes situations. We expect that primary psychopathy, especially in male participants, will be related to enhanced lie detection ability. Furthermore, as age-related decline in both facets of psychopathy has been reported (Gill & Crino, 2012), which could be linked to an age-related decline in competition for status and mates (Wilson & Daly, 1985), we limit our sample to participants who were between 18 and 30 years of age.