Summary: A new university study found that people who score higher on measures of psychopathic traits can learn to lie more quickly after practice than those who score low on these traits. The research suggests that greater psychopathic tendency may be linked not to an innate advantage at lying, but to a greater capacity to acquire the skill through training.
Source: Biomed Central.
People with higher psychopathic traits learned to lie faster after practice than those with lower traits, a study published in the open‑access journal Translational Psychiatry reports. The authors interpret the results as evidence that higher psychopathic traits may improve the trainability of deceptive responding rather than provide an inherent ability to deceive.
Researchers Dr. Tatia Lee and Dr. Robin Shao from the State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Laboratory of Neuropsychology at The University of Hong Kong tested whether individuals with higher psychopathic traits are better learners when it comes to lying. The team examined both behavioral performance and brain activity, using reaction time measures and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
The study recruited 52 university students who were classified into two groups based on a validated questionnaire for psychopathic traits in non‑clinical populations: 29 students with relatively high psychopathic traits and 23 students with relatively low psychopathic traits. All participants completed a task that required them to view photographs of familiar and unfamiliar faces and then respond to a cue to answer either honestly or deceptively about whether they recognized the person.
Researchers recorded response times for truthful and deceptive answers and measured brain activation during the task with fMRI. After the initial session, participants completed a two‑session training exercise designed to practice producing truthful and untruthful responses. The task was then repeated to assess changes in behavioral speed and neural processing.
Behaviorally, the main finding was clear: after the training sessions, students with higher psychopathic traits exhibited a significant reduction in the time it took them to produce deceptive responses compared with their pre‑training performance. In contrast, students with lower psychopathic traits displayed no reliable improvement in lying speed. Before training, the two groups did not differ significantly in their ability to lie quickly, making the post‑training divergence especially notable.
Neuroimaging results provided a possible explanation for the behavioral differences. The researchers observed that lying engages several executive processes—attention, working memory, inhibitory control and conflict resolution—because truthful information must be suppressed and replaced by an untruthful response. In participants with higher psychopathic traits, the neural signals associated with these lie‑related processes were reduced after training, and functional connectivity changed in frontoparietal and cerebellar networks. By contrast, participants with lower psychopathic traits showed increased activation in these regions when lying, suggesting their brains required additional effort to produce untruthful responses and therefore did not show the same speed gains.
Dr. Tatia Lee noted the striking contrast between groups: “The stark contrast between individuals with high and low levels of psychopathic traits in lying performance following two training sessions is remarkable, given that there were no significant differences in lying performance between the two groups prior to training.” Dr. Robin Shao added, “High psychopathy is characterized by untruthfulness and manipulativeness, but the evidence so far was not clear on whether high‑psychopathic individuals in the general population tend to lie more or better than others. Our findings provide evidence that people with high psychopathic traits might just be better at learning how to lie.”
The authors emphasize important limitations. Because all study participants were university students, the findings may not generalize to other populations, including clinical or incarcerated groups. Further research will be necessary to determine how broadly the observed training effects and neural patterns apply.
Are individuals with higher psychopathic traits better learners at lying? Behavioural and neural evidence
High psychopathy is associated with traits such as untruthfulness and manipulativeness, but prior evidence about whether non‑incarcerated individuals with higher psychopathic tendencies are more prone or more capable of lying has been mixed. Critically, no prior research examined whether greater psychopathic tendency predicts superior trainability of deceptive responding. Using a longitudinal design with university students who varied in psychopathic traits, this study demonstrates that practice produced significant improvements in the speed of lying about face familiarity, but only among participants with higher psychopathic traits. This behavioral improvement corresponded with reductions in lie‑related neural signals and alterations in functional connectivity within frontoparietal and cerebellar networks. These results suggest that psychopathic traits modulate the plasticity of both behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying deception, supporting the view that individuals with higher psychopathic traits may exhibit preserved or enhanced executive network function alongside affective processing differences when adapting to trained deceptive tasks.