It takes one to know one: Relationship between lie detection and psychopathy

• We investigated whether psychopathy relates to improved lie detection.
• We found that participants performed above chance in high-stakes emotional lies.
• Sex moderated the relationship between psychopathy and lie detection.
• Primary psychopathy related to increased detection in men.
• In women, primary psychopathy related to decreased detection.

We investigated primary and secondary psychopathy and the ability to detect high-stakes, real-life emotional lies in an on-line experiment (N = 150). Using signal detection analysis, we found that lie detection ability was overall above chance level, there was a tendency towards responding liberally to the test stimuli, and women were more accurate than men. Further, sex moderated the relationship between psychopathy and lie detection ability; in men, primary psychopathy had a significant positive correlation with the ability to detect lies, whereas in women there was a significant negative correlation with deception detection. The results are discussed with reference to evolutionary theory and sex differences in processing socio-emotional information.