First Person
Blindto
the truthDate
by JULIAN KEENAN
There
are many reasons to love lying.
In 2001, I arrived at Montclair State University and established The Cognitive
Neuroimaging Laboratory in the Department of Psychology. It is here
that my students and I continue to investigate deception and its root
in our evolution.
There are a number of interesting facts about lying. The average person
tells one lie per day and lies in about one-third of all encounters. Children
begin lying around the end of the second year. About 95 percent of 5-year-olds
tell some sort of lie. Deception is seen in all cultures--there is no
society that is not immersed in deception.
In short, deception is everywhere, but nowhere is deception more prevalent
than during dating. At Montclair State, we have been trying to understand
lying during dating. We have found that both genders lie at about the
same rate, and that this rate was quite high. In addition, all students
admitted to deceiving on the first date, and the way they deceive is highly
creative.
When we asked open-ended questions about dating, giving the students a
chance to explain their dating rituals, some really interesting stories
emerged. For example, one student admitted to renting a car (without telling
his date) to look "cooler and richer."
Men and women, as one might guess, lie about very different things. Across
a series of studies at a number of institutions, we have found that men
most often deceive about their income and their commitment. Females most
often deceive in regards to their physical characteristics. Ask a man
his weight and you will usually get the truth. Females are much more reserved
when asked this question. However, females will tell you the truth about
their income. Males tend to increase that figure.
While these findings seem somewhat expected, what surprised us was deception
detection. It turns out that females are better than men at detecting
deception during a date. Women are better at picking out when men are
lying and what men lie about. Dana Salotti and Steve Chalett, two undergraduate
research assistants in the laboratory, found that men are far below women
in terms of knowing about lying.
Graduate students Amanda Johnson and Allison Barnacz had published a series
of papers looking into what factors lead to being good deceivers. Women
in a relationship are not nearly as good as single women at picking out
men who lie. When presented with videos of men lying or telling the truth,
it was the single women that surpassed the committed women in picking
out deception. The reason, we suspect, is that the radar of single women
is up. Single women are faced with the pressures of dating and are in
situations in which they need to make correct choices. They need to discern
the true from the false more often and thus have a sensitivity that married
or deeply involved women do not possess. For men, the situation is different--they
are just generally poor at picking up on deception. Interestingly, they
think they are good.
Overall, though, neither gender is very good at picking up on deception.
The rates are rarely above chance. A number of my students are looking
into this. For example, graduate student Karen Kelly is using Transcranial
Magnetic Stimulation--a neuroimaging technique in our laboratory--to determine
what areas might be useful in detecting deception. In a paper due out
this month in the journal Laterality, Sarah Malcolm '04 found that the
right hemisphere of the brain might be more involved in deception detection.
We think females might access the right hemisphere to a greater degree
than men. The female advantage in detecting deception during a date might
be related to how they use their brain.
Our research on dating and deception has led us to some deeper insights
about our evolution. Humans, at least during our evolution, have done
everything to gain a mating advantage. If you consider the advantage deception
gives a person (today or a million years ago), you can quickly imagine
that those who deceive will quickly out reproduce those who tell the truth.
Student Sean Stevens and William Christiana '03 have finished a book chapter
that suggests that the right hemisphere developed because of deception.
In brief, they argue that deception is a right hemisphere function and
this ability led to the right hemisphere's maturation. Taking this one
step further, it is realistic to postulate that our evolution has been
driven in some part by lying.
Most people, however, have lying all wrong. They put a moral judgment
on deception and lying without considering the complexity behind deceiving.
Humans are one of the few species that are intentional liars. To be a
good deceiver, a lot has to happen. First, I have to consider what the
other person wants to hear. Then, I have to put together a plausible series
of events that support the lie. A good deceiver is a good mind reader
and this is not an easy thing to do. The better a person is at figuring
out another person's mind, the better they are at deception tasks. The
two are related and both require a lot of brain.
Lying is in fact one of the most complex cognitive abilities that humans
have. Putting the moral implications aside, we realize that deception
is amazing.
Julian Paul Keenan, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology and director of
the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Montclair State University. Keenan,
who has extensive training in both self-awareness and neuroimaging, is
the author of The Face in the Mirror: The Search for the Origins of
Consciousness, and he has been featured in numerous print and electronic
media.