Does the brain activity underlying the production of deception differ depending on whether or not one believes their deception can be detected? To address this question, we had participants commit a mock theft in a laboratory setting, and then interrogated them while they underwent functional MRI (fMRI) scanning. Crucially, during some parts of the interrogation participants believed a lie-dete...

By definition, lying involves withholding the truth. Response inhibition may therefore be the cognitive function at the heart of deception. Neuroimaging research has shown that the same brain region that is activated during response inhibition tasks, namely the inferior frontal region, is also activated during deception paradigms. This led to the hypothesis that the inferior frontal region is t...

This study explores how Linkedin shapes patterns of deception in resumes. The general self-presentation goal to appear favorably to others motivates deception when one's true characteristics are inconsistent with their desired impression. Because Linkedin makes resume claims public, deception patterns should be altered relative to traditional resumes. Participants (n=119) in a between-subjects ...

Psychology studies show that people detect deception no more accurately than by chance, and it is therefore important to develop tools to enable the detection of deception. The problem of deception detection has been studied for a significant amount of time, however in the last 1015 years we have seen methods of computational linguistics being employed with greater frequency. Texts are processe...

In recent years, computer-media dated communication has not only become extremely popular but has also begun to hold an important function in daily social interactions. This qualitative study investigates the communication phenomena of deception as it occurs in the online dating environment. The research study focused on four questions: (1) About what characteristics are online daters deceptive...

The recent decade we observed an explosion of social networking services along with the number of users on them. The nature of these sites make identity deception much easier by offering a quick way of setting up identities, managing them and being able to easily deceive and connect with others. Fighting deception requires a coordinated approach by users and developers to ensure detection and p...

The 170-year-long debate in the medical literature about the ethics of prescribing placebos in medical therapeutics needs to be reevaluated in light of recent placebo research and improved understanding of the placebo effect as an integral part of the doctor-patient relationship. It has traditionally been assumed that deception is an indispensible component of successful placebo use. Therefore,...

Self-deception is widespread in humans even though it can lead to disastrous consequences such as airplane crashes and financial meltdowns. Why is this potentially harmful trait so common? A controversial theory proposes that self-deception evolved to facilitate the deception of others. We test this hypothesis in the real world and find support for it: Overconfident individuals are overrated by...

Suppose we wanted to create an intelligent machine that somehow drew its intelligence from large collections of text, possibly involving the processing of collections available on the Web such as Wikipedia. Does past research in deception offer a sufficiently robust basis upon which we might develop a means to filter out texts that are deceptive, either partially or entirely? Could we identify,...

Regulated by self-consciousness, self-deception is a part of the self-system that suppresses negative aspects of the self and maintains a positive moral self-concept. We tested this evolutionary hypothesis on 166 college students by measuring self-deception using both a questionnaire and a series of hypothetical helping scenarios. The results showed a positive correlation between self-deception...