The stress response has offered the world a way to detect lying. When a person is lying they are likely to be nervous and this arouses the autonomic nervous system leading to sweating — and that’s what lie detectors measure. But this method is notoriously unreliable because a person may be nervous for all sorts of reasons and well-practiced liars may not feel any stress and so, no sweat.
A recent suggestion from psychologists Thomas Omerod and Coral Dando (2014) is to analyse the language that people use. This idea of using language to identify inner feelings may be familiar to some of you who have studied research on the language of psychopaths (for example, they use more past tense verbs and make more references to basic needs when describing a murder they committed).
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
