2013/04/03 by Emma Williams, Lewis Bott, John Patrick +1 · 1 citation
Psychology · Social Sciences · Computer Science · #Deception detection and forensic psychology #Psychology of Social Influence #Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
paper · pdf · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060713
openalex publication_date 2013/04/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Telling a lie takes longer than telling the truth but precisely why remains uncertain. We investigated two processes suggested to increase response times, namely the decision to lie and the construction of a lie response. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were directed or chose whether to lie or tell the truth. A colored square was presented and participants had to name either the true color of the square or lie about it by claiming it was a different color. In both experiments we found that there was a greater difference between lying and telling the truth when participants were directed to lie compared to when they chose to lie. In Experiments 3 and 4, we compared response times when participants had only one possible lie option to a choice of two or three possible options. There was a greater lying latency effect when questions involved more than one possible lie response. Experiment 5 examined response choice mechanisms through the manipulation of lie plausibility. Overall, results demonstrate several distinct mechanisms that contribute to additional processing requirements when individuals tell a lie.