Older people cannot lie as convincingly as younger people, are worse at detecting when others are lying, and the latter is linked to age-related decline in emotion recognition, new University of Otago research suggests.
Department of Psychology researchers Ted Ruffman, Janice Murray and Jamin Halberstadt compared young and older adults’ skills at deception as judged by listeners within and outside their age group. Dr Murray presented the findings today at the Association of Psychological Science’s annual convention in Washington, D.C.
The study involved 60 participants being shown video clips of 20 people expressing their actual or false views on topical issues such as factory farming and stem cell use in humans. Ten of the speakers were aged 30 or under and 10 were 60 or over. Two clips of each speaker were shown; one in which they were lying, and the other being truthful.
The 60 listeners, who consisted of two equal-sized groups with average ages of 21 and 71, were asked to determine if the person in each clip was being truthful or lying. They also underwent tests that required judgments of emotional expression and age in faces.
Associate Professor Halberstadt says the results of the lie detection test showed that both young and older listeners found it easier to differentiate truths and lies when the speaker was an older adult compared to a young adult.
“It could be that older people are less convincing liars because the kinds of cognitive abilities required for successful deceit are also those that tend to deteriorate with age,” he says.
Lying places demands on memory and planning ability (e.g., formulating a plausible argument, keeping story facts straight) and on social understanding (e.g., judging whether a particular argument will convince a listener, as well as keeping track of a listener’s response as the lie unfolds to potentially alter the argument). [continue reading…]