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chinese researchers, climate, current-events, effectively, for liars, gaming, lie, politics, science, young
For liars, it seems, practice very nearly makes perfect.
Chinese researchers asked three groups of young adults to answer questions about themselves, in some cases truthfully and in others falsely, and tracked reaction times as a measure of how difficult participants found it to lie. The scientists found that members of the group given practice before a second round of testing were able to get their reaction times for deception down to almost the same level as their reaction times when telling the truth.
Even more surprising: a second group, told the results of the first trial and exhorted to do better, also improved in the second trial. A control group given an irrelevant task between trials made no improvement. The findings suggest that lying is not as hard as many people think, especially when (as in a criminal case) people have time to prepare.