To expose even the most seasoned liars, you do not need a lie detector. Just ask him a few questions using the right precautions and the lie will soon be discovered, according to Aldert Vrij, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, writes the Italian scientific journal, Focus.
According to the eminent academic, to knock down a liar's house of letters it is enough to distract him while asking him questions about the facts to be verified, asking him to perform specific tasks that require a good level of concentration.
The cognitive effort required to lie, combined with what is required to complete the required task, would in fact be unstable to the average human brain.
"Lies and truth can be just as credible as long as you think carefully about what you are saying. "When the ability to concentrate fails, the truth, by its very nature ingrained in our brains, tends to prevail."
In the experiments performed, participants were asked to transcribe the license plates of several cars that had been shown to them before. Meanwhile, they were asked to indicate their opinion, real or fictional, on the news received from the press, while the task of the interviewers was to identify the liars.
The study was published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Behavioral Psychology and Analysis.
According to the results of the study, those who lied in the test were identified for immediate lack of answers to questions about their version, for lack of reliability and explanatory clarity.
In fact, telling a lie reliably requires attention to detail, a persuasive narrative, and attention to not fall into contradiction, all activities that require a high degree of concentration: if performed while completing another complex task , such as memory, long sequences of letters and numbers, can lead our brains to inappropriate short circuits.