Lying liars who lie in reverse order as they tell their story are easier to detect than those who tell the story chronologically. This is because the increase in cognitive load is too much for the whole thing to go off as smoothly as when the story is told in the order in which the “script” is learned.
“Little American Brown Weasel“
Vrij et al., Increasing cognitive load to facilitate lie detection: the benefit of recalling an event in reverse order,” Law and Human Behavior 32:253-265 (June 2008, visited 06.11.08), abstract reprinted below:
1: Law Hum Behav. 2008 Jun;32(3):253-65. Epub 2007 Aug 13.
Increasing cognitive load to facilitate lie detection: the benefit of recalling an event in reverse order.
Vrij A, Mann SA, Fisher RP, Leal S, Milne R, Bull R.
Psychology Department, University of Portsmouth, King Henry Building, King Henry
1 Street, Portsmouth, PO1 2DY, UK, aldert.vrij@port.ac.uk.
In two experiments, we tested the hypotheses that (a) the difference between liars and truth tellers will be greater when interviewees report their stories inreverse order than in chronological order, and (b) instructing interviewees torecall their stories in reverse order will facilitate detecting deception. In Experiment 1, 80 mock suspects told the truth or lied about a staged event and did or did not report their stories in reverse order. The reverse order interviews contained many more cues to deceit than the control interviews. In Experiment 2, 55 police officers watched a selection of the videotaped interviews of Experiment 1 and made veracity judgements. Requesting suspects to convey their stories in reverse order improved police observers’ ability to detect deception and did not result in a response bias.
PMID: 17694424 [PubMed - in process]
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