New sign to catch men LYING revealed by psychologists
LYING men imitate the body language of other men they're lying to, according to a new study.
This discovery could lead to the creation of new lie detector tests.
“Liars often deliberately change their behaviour into a way they think truth-tellers behave, but this particular copycat behaviour is something they wouldn’t even try to manipulate because they don’t realise they’re doing it,” Sophie van der Zee at Erasmus University Rotterdam told the New Scientist.
She added: "That could make it an interesting cue for detecting deceit."
Van der Zee was part of a research team that studied 50 male participants that were given a wooden puzzle task.
The men were told they had 5 minutes and that the task was easy.
In reality it was much more difficult and 5 minutes wasn't enough time.
Van der Zee told the men she'd "hidden" the puzzle answer in the room for them and encouraged them to cheat.
However, she told them not to tell her supervisor she was providing the answer.
The researchers then recorded each student speaking to one other male student about the puzzle and how they solved it.
Those who stuck by Van der Zee's request not to tell about the hidden answer were recorded lying.
The students wore devices called wireless accelerometers so their head, chest and wrist movements could be noted down.
Results showed that the men who didn't lie had different body movements to the person they were lying to.
However, if they were lying then they tended to copy the movements of the man they were talking to.
The researchers theorised that the liars subconsciously mimicked their listeners because lying requires a lot of concentration and mimicking body language is easier than thinking of their own.
The mimicking was not said to be obvious to the naked eye despite being picked up by the equipment.
One drawback of the study was that the accelerometer results didn't determine whether the liar or the listener was aligning their body language first.
The full study can be read in the Royal Society Open Science journal.
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