| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 890834 | Personality and Individual Differences | 2013 | 4 Pages |
•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.
