Cortical liars

Super Liars

Kripke's theory of truth offered a trivalent semantics for a language which, like English, contains a truth predicate and means of self-reference; but it did so by severely restricting the expressive power of the logic. In Kripke's analysis, the Liar (e.g. This very sentence is not true) receives the indeterminate truth value, but this fact cannot be expressed in the language; by contrast, it i...

Catching Liars.

While trying to think of an interesting way to introduce this major review of the field of lie detection, I did what lots of people do these days. I typed ‘‘catching liars’’ into the Google search bar and up came 305,000 results in .17 seconds. The first page was ‘‘10 ways to catch a liar’’ from WebMD. The essay featured J.J. Newberry, a trained federal agent purported to be skilled at detectin...

Fears May Be Liars

Liars, Damned Liars, and Zealots: The Effect of Moral Mandates on Transgressive Advocacy Acceptance

This research explored people’s reactions to targets who “went too far” to support noble causes. We hypothesized that observers’ moral mandates would shape their perceptions of others’ advocacy, even when that advocacy was transgressive, that is, when it used norm-violating means (i.e., lying) to achieve a preferred end. Observers were expected to accept others’ advocacy, independent of its cre...

Prefrontal white matter in pathological liars.

BACKGROUND Studies have shown increased bilateral activation in the prefrontal cortex when normal individuals lie, but there have been no structural imaging studies of deceitful individuals. AIMS To assess whether deceitful individuals show structural abnormalities in prefrontal grey and white matter volume. METHOD Prefrontal grey and white matter volumes were assessed using structural magn...