Giulia Romano Cappi

Now you have to tell me, to convince me that your score was actually good.

And you will start maybe sweating.

You're like, yes, yes, I actually did good.

Yeah, so what we really wanted was to investigate those that... So one of the possible scores was you were probably good or you were probably bad.

And in that uncertainty, we found the self-deception, no?

Because if I don't tell you a certain answer, if I don't tell you you're certainly among the best, you're certainly among the worst, but I tell you probably...

then there's the space where you can play with yourself.

I mean, where you can actually say, okay, maybe I can convince myself I actually did good.

And so that was our target participants.

And what we found is that you can actually see a difference, a significant difference, of course, between the truth and the lie.

That is something that is well known in research.

But also we could find that there's a difference between the outright lie and the lie.

Yeah, exactly.

That's the actual question.

So I don't know.

I would say that there's a saying that's fake it until you make it, no?

I think it's that.

So if you tell yourself something long enough, maybe you end up actually believing that.

I mean, in our research, we found that if you believe that, your response is not comparable to an actual lie, but not comparable to an actual truth.

So that's the novelty here, the fact that there's an in-between and a gray area between truth and deception.