Pathological Liars

Abstract

Every day, a lie is being told. It could your friend, your parents, or even you. The average person tells about two lies a day (Vrij, Granhag, and Mann 2010). Most of these lies thought are “white lies”, which are small lies that will not have negative consequences. Although, sometimes lies can be dangerous and can hurt someone. In the current paper, I review theories and evidence on why people choose to not tell the truth. I discuss the characteristics of lying and deception and the effect psychopathy has on compulsive lying. I suggest that future research focus on pathological liars and why they cannot resist lying. I was not aware of many of the topics that I found about lying and deception, and I feel as though I have a whole

When asked why they lie, most people respond with either they did not want to get hurt or they did not want to hurt someone else. Sometimes though, people lie to cover up something devious that they have done. Verschuere and Hout (2016) state that lying requires additional mental effort while telling the truth does not. This refers to the fact that lying is not a person’s natural state, and people choose to lie. Psychopathology and lying have always been associated, it is even said that they are compulsive liars. What if a psychopath’s natural state is to lie? Knowing what makes a good liar can help law enforcement interrogate suspects more effectively and can help solve crimes (Vrij et al. 2010). In the current paper, I review theories and evidence on the characteristics of a good liar and whether or not psychopaths are naturally good

The sample included 50 adult male participants with age ranging from 23-67 years old. Participants were violent offenders serving prison time. Participants then filled a survey that took about 1.5 hour complete. The survey included questions with the instruction to either lie, tell the truth, or they had a choice to lie or tell the truth. When given the choice, the researchers found that participants chose to tell the more often (78%) than lie (22%). In addition, when the participants were instructed to lie, there were more errors and they were slower to answer the question compared to when they were instructed to tell the truth. In conclusion, the researchers found that even for psychopaths, lying requires greater mental thought than telling the