Recent research published in Applied Cognitive Psychology provides new evidence regarding the relationship between personality traits and the ability to lie and detect lies. The study compares individuals from the general community with an incarcerated population to determine if a “deception-general” ability exists across different environments. The findings suggest that while effective liars in the community are also better at detecting lies, this association does not hold for those in prison.
Deception is a multifaceted behavior that involves both the production of false information and the detection of deceit in others. Most scientific inquiries into this subject have relied on passive tasks, such as asking participants to watch videos of strangers lying. This approach often fails to capture the dynamic, interpersonal nature of real-world deception. The authors of the new study sought to address this gap by using an interactive task that requires participants to both lie and judge the veracity of others in real time.
A primary motivation for this research was to investigate the “deception-general” ability hypothesis. This hypothesis posits that the cognitive and social skills required to craft a convincing lie are essentially the same skills needed to spot a lie. The researchers also aimed to explore how “dark” personality traits influence these abilities. There is a common assumption that manipulative individuals, or those with antisocial traits, possess a superior ability to detect manipulation in others.
“Deception is a fundamental aspect of human communication, yet it is mostly studied in controlled, artificial settings that fail to capture the complexity of real-world exchanges,” explained study authors Laura Visu-Petra, a professor and coordinator of the RIDDLE Lab at Babeș-Bolyai University, and Andreea Turi, who works in the rehabilitation department of a Romanian maximum security prison.
“We wanted to examine the dynamics of deception as it occurs in actual social interactions, where people lie, are being deceived, and constantly need to adjust their behaviors and judgments accordingly. Using an ecological scenario, we explored whether individual lie production and lie detection skills are related, revealing a so-called ‘general deception ability.’”
“We also wondered whether this ability would be enhanced in hostile environments such as prison settings, where one can have more opportunities to encounter and practice deception compared to everyday settings. Finally, we aimed to explore whether high individual levels of aversive traits, such as the Dark Factor, alexithymia, and aggression, would further fine-tune this ability.”
The research team recruited a total of 140 participants for the study. The sample consisted of 60 individuals from the general community and 80 incarcerated individuals from a maximum-security prison. The community participants were volunteers recruited from a workplace setting. The prison sample included individuals with varying criminal histories, including theft, drug-related offenses, and violent crimes.
Data collection occurred in three distinct phases. In the first phase, participants completed interviews to provide demographic data and background information. The second phase involved a battery of self-report questionnaires designed to measure personality traits. Both groups completed the Dark Factor inventory, which assesses traits such as callousness, deceitfulness, and narcissistic entitlement.
The prison group completed additional assessments that were not administered to the community group. These included the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale and the Aggression Questionnaire. They also completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. Alexithymia is a psychological construct characterized by a difficulty in identifying and describing one’s own emotions.
The third phase involved the Deceptive Interaction Task (DeceIT). Participants were organized into small groups of six. They first completed a survey to establish their genuine opinions on various controversial topics. During the game, participants took turns acting as “Senders” and “Receivers.”
Senders drew cards that instructed them to either tell the truth or lie about their opinion on a topic. They spoke for approximately 20 seconds to convince the group. Receivers then rated the veracity of the statement on a scale from “not at all likely” to “very likely” to be true. This design allowed the researchers to obtain objective measures of lie production ability and lie detection accuracy for every participant.
“We relied on an ingenious round-robin paradigm (DeceIT) developed by Wright and collaborators (2012), now applied for the first time to a prison context,” Visu-Petra and Turi told PsyPost. Firstly, inmates or age- and education-matched community participants privately expressed their real opinions about multiple controversial topics, such as ‘Smoking should be banned from all public places.’”
“Next, placed in a small group of previously unacquainted people, each person took turns between a Sender role (telling the truth or lying to the group about their real opinion) and a Judge role (assessing if other Senders were telling lies or truths). An individual’s proficiency score in producing credible lies or in detecting deception was computed after several iterations.”
The researchers analyzed the data using Signal Detection Theory. This statistical framework allows for the separation of actual detection accuracy from response bias. Response bias refers to a general tendency to categorize statements as true or false regardless of their actual content.
In the community sample, the data supported the existence of a deception-general ability. The analysis showed a correlation between the ability to produce lies that were hard to detect and the ability to accurately detect lies told by others. This suggests that among the general public, the skills utilized for lying and lie detection are linked.
The results from the prison sample presented a different pattern. There was no significant correlation between lie production and lie detection abilities among incarcerated participants. Being a skilled liar in prison did not translate to being a skilled lie detector. This finding indicates that the high-stakes environment of a prison may disrupt the relationship between these two skills.
“The ‘general deception ability’ was confirmed in the general population, although the association between the two abilities was not particularly strong, similar to initial findings by Wright and collaborators (2012),” the researchers explained. “However, this association appears to be highly context-dependent, since we found no evidence for it in the prison sample. Moreover, inmates were lower in their deception detection accuracy.”
The researchers also examined the influence of the Dark Factor of personality. The Dark Factor represents a core disposition toward minimizing the welfare of others for personal gain. In the prison sample, higher scores on the Dark Factor were associated with lower accuracy in detecting lies. Specific themes such as Callousness, Deceitfulness, and Narcissistic Entitlement were negatively correlated with detection performance.
The additional measures administered to the prison sample provided further context. The analysis revealed that lie detection accuracy was negatively correlated with psychopathy and aggression. Inmates who scored higher on measures of interpersonal manipulation and physical aggression were less accurate at distinguishing truths from lies.
Alexithymia also emerged as a significant factor in the prison findings. Participants who struggled to identify or describe their own feelings performed worse on the lie detection task. This supports the idea that emotional awareness is a component of detecting deception. Without the ability to process their own emotional reactions, individuals may miss the “gut feelings” or subtle affective signals that often accompany the detection of a lie.
In terms of lie production, alexithymia also appeared to be a hindrance. Prisoners who had difficulty describing their feelings were less successful at producing convincing lies. This suggests that crafting a credible deception requires a degree of emotional intelligence and expressiveness.
“Aversive personality traits were found to play a role in shaping deception abilities within the prison context, but not in the general community,” Visu-Petra and Turi said. “Surprisingly, the effect was not in the expected direction. Higher levels of dark factor themes (especially deceitfulness), aggression, and alexithymia (difficulty identifying and describing emotions) were actually negatively related to deception detection proficiency.”
“These traits may affect the emotional awareness and social sensitivity needed to read subtle cues. In high-stress environments like prisons, hostile tendencies may be amplified, significantly reducing attention and processing capacity, or simply revealing a less optimal decoding of social cues that interfere with deception detection.”
Both the community and prison groups exhibited a “truth bias.” This means that participants were generally more likely to judge a statement as true than as false. This finding contradicts some previous research suggesting that prisoners might possess a “lie bias” due to the low-trust environment of a correctional facility. The authors propose that truth bias may serve an adaptive social function even in prison, facilitating basic cooperation and reducing cognitive load.
Since data collection overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers also assessed the impact of wearing face masks. Statistical analysis showed that wearing a mask did not significantly impair lie detection accuracy. However, it was associated with a stronger truth bias. The lack of full facial cues may have led participants to default to assuming honesty.
Sociodemographic factors played a minor role in the results. Age showed a weak association with detection skills, with younger prisoners performing slightly better. Gender did not predict performance in either group. Among prisoners, those with a history of recidivism were slightly better at detecting lies, lending some support to the idea that prolonged exposure to criminal environments might sharpen these skills.
“Overall, the findings highlight that lie detection and production are influenced by the complex interplay between individual traits, environmental, and contextual factors,” Visu-Petra and Turi explained. “This research not only contributes to the theoretical understanding of deception but also has practical implications for improving interrogation strategies, rehabilitation programs, and interpersonal dynamics in forensic and correctional settings. For instance, psychological interventions aimed at reducing aggression and hostile attribution biases should incorporate mistaken inferences of inmates who perceive they are being lied to when it’s not the case, a recurring problem in incarcerated populations.”
The researchers noted some limitations to the study. The findings are correlational, which prevents the determination of cause and effect. It is unclear whether dark traits cause poor lie detection or if environmental factors influence both. The reliance on self-report measures for personality traits also introduces the possibility of response bias, particularly regarding socially undesirable traits.
Looking ahead, “we aim to incorporate qualitative methods to better understand prisoners’ attitudes toward deception and to identify the actual cues they rely on when detecting lies,” Visu-Petra and Turi said. “Ultimately, we hope to bring to light the intricate mechanisms underlying deception production and detection, explore how environmental and individual factors interact, and generate insights that could inform interventions to improve social and emotional functioning, as well as ethical practices in forensic and correctional settings.”
The study, “Behind Bars and Lies: Dark Personality Traits, Lying, and Detecting Deception in the Prison Population Versus the General Community,” was authored by Andreea Turi, Mircea Zloteanu, Daria Mihaela Solescu, Mădălina-Raluca Rebeleș, and Laura Visu-Petra.
