Friends of the Nonverbal Communication Blog, this week we present the paper “Do not think carefully? Re-examining the effect of unconscious thought on deception detection” by Wu, S.; Mei, H. and Yan, J. (2019) in which authors carry out two studies to know whether the unconscious thought improves our deception detection’s ability compared to conscious thought.
Nonverbal language studies about deception detection have found that, actually, people are not very good at differentiating between truths and lies. In fact, our hitting percentage is usually slightly above the probability level.
Psychologists have given numerous explanations for these results: it may be that individuals cannot consciously process so much complex information in such a short time, due to our limited cognitive resources; furthermore, the differences between liars and those who tell the truth are very subtle; finally, individuals held incorrect beliefs about how to discover liars.
Researchers, in one of their many attempts to overcome this percentage of precision, have proposed that the unconscious thought could improve our ability to detect lies.
Why? Because all the reasons mentioned above are related to consciousness, then it is possible that we can improve the ability to detect deception by restricting conscious thought or promoting the unconscious one.
But what do these words mean? The theory of the unconscious thought proposed that people who are dedicated to this, can obtain better results when making complex decisions.
Conscious thinking refers to thought processes relevant to the objective of the moment, which occurs when attention is also focused on the objective task. Unconscious thinking refers to thought processes that are also relevant to the objective of the moment, but occur when conscious attention is focused on distracting tasks.
In an experiment mentioned in the article, was found that the performance of individuals on a target task improved after the distraction task. However, in other studies, no substantial evidence of this effect was found. Even studies that obtained significant effects were criticized for having very small samples and other limitations.
Online experiments have also been conducted, but it is difficult to monitor and control the real behaviors of the participants under these conditions.
Therefore, the first objective of the article is to observe the effects of unconscious thinking in the detection of deception through laboratory experiments.
To better understand the effect of unconscious thinking, it is helpful to identify specific signals or information that unconscious thinking uses to decide. In an experiment cited in the article, natural position, vocal tension, and length of pauses were found to be effective cues that helped participants with the unconscious thinking condition make accurate decisions.
Since these are nonverbal cues, unconscious thought may be more sensitive to nonverbal cues. Plus, coincidentally, there is some evidence with the contrary for conscious thinking.
The first of the experiments was carried out with 145 students, who were the research subjects. Another 16 were invited, who would be those who would produce the stimuli. Then they were asked to describe the experience of a trip, some of them had to lie and others had to tell the truth. Later, they were videotaped as they narrated their journey.
Research subject students were randomly assigned either the immediate decision condition or the unconscious thinking condition.
In the first case, they had to make a judgment immediately after each stimulus was presented to them. These stimuli consist of videos and audios.
In the case of the subjects assigned to the unconscious thinking condition, they were first asked to listen to the stimuli without making judgments. Then, have them do a Sudoku game for 3 minutes. Finally, they had to make their decision about the narratives.
The mean precision of all participants was 47.93%. The results did not, at first, support the authors’ hypothesis. Unconscious thinking showed no advantage in deception detection compared to immediate decision.
Bearing this in mind, it is considered too early to draw conclusions in one direction or the other.
In the second study, the stimulus was presented to distract the subjects while they had to make the target decisions.
The overall precision of the unconscious thinking group was higher in the second study than in the first. One explanation may be that in the second study subjects were given 20 minutes to complete tasks, instead of just 3.
To better understand these conflicting results, researchers must construct a more specific theory that focuses on the limits and requirements of the effect of unconscious thinking, to explain how, when, and why unconscious processes can enhance the ability to detect deception.
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