The truth about lying

The truth about lying.

The standard view in social science and philosophy is that lying does not require the liar's assertion to be false, only that the liar believes it to be false. We conducted three experiments to test whether lying requires falsity. Overall, the results suggest that it does. We discuss some implications for social scientists working on social judgments, research on lie detection, and public moral...

Commentary: getting at the truth about pathological lying.

Lying is common, and in its many aspects forms a normal part of social interchange. In this issue, Dike et al. review the literature on what has been referred to as pathological lying, highlighting the lack of information available about this phenomenon. In this commentary on Dike et al., it is noted that if pathological lying exists, it is not the lie, but the liar that is abnormal, with the a...

The truth about lying: inhibition of the anterior prefrontal cortex improves deceptive behavior.

Recent neuroimaging studies have indicated a predominant role of the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) in deception and moral cognition, yet the functional contribution of the aPFC to deceptive behavior remains unknown. We hypothesized that modulating the excitability of the aPFC by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could reveal its functional contribution in generating deceitful r...

The Truth About Defaults

Truth about Truth Detecting Techniques

During the period from 2001 to 2010 police officials in India were lured by a team of pseudo-scientists, from the Forensic Laboratories in Bangalore and Ahmadabad to make use of narcoanalysis, polygraph test and brain fingerprinting to extract confessions from accused persons. All the three tests, preceded by a pre-test interview and interrogation, were conducted by the one and the same expert ...