Your Body Gives it Away When You Self-Deceive
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What is self-deception and how does it manifest?
Your procrastination deserves a destination. Welcome to The Last Show with David Cooper. We all know what lying to other people feels like, but what about those strange moments where you're not quite lying, you're just very optimistic about your own greatness. You're deceiving yourself even. Turns out your body might know what's really going on when that happens. I'm here with Giulia Romano Cappi, a researcher in social neuroscience at the University of Turin in Italy who studied this. Giulia, welcome to the show.
Thank you, David. I'm very happy to be here.
So self-deception, what do we mean when we say that? What might I be doing if I act in self-deception?
So, you know, sometimes we don't really like the truth around us. So sometimes we may decide to tell something to ourselves just to feel better about the actual truth. Sometimes, you know, the truth is hard.
How does the body respond to self-deception?
And so we try to deceive ourselves first. And then maybe we also use these as a means to present ourselves in a more positive way to others. So it's not really about the fact that we align to others, but first we align to ourselves so that we may be more convincing somehow.
Yeah, so we're talking to friends and we're bragging about something, but maybe we exaggerate a little bit too much. And while we do it, we might even believe that it's true, something like that.
Yeah. And that's because, you know, they always speak about the use of polygraph in court. And we always ask ourselves, why don't we use that? And the reason is because our body actually responds to lying because it's stressful, you know, so you start sweating, actual sweating. And that's what we did. We recorded the people sweating. So not as you can imagine, like heavy sweating. But we have some sensors that we can put on people's hands and they are able to capture some micro sweating. And the thing is, everything can be a source of anxiety, no? And lying is, I mean, you get anxiety when you lie, if you are an honest person, at least.
Yes. That's what I was just thinking. And there's probably people who love lying, but okay. So how do you set up this test? How do you convince people to speak wired up to all this stuff and then maybe brag a little bit? How do you even know they're bragging?
So what we did is that we presented them with some tasks, some mathematical tasks, and we said like, okay, solve them. And then when you solve them, after solving them, we will ask you how you think you performed. And so they could say like, I think I performed well, I think I performed bad. After that, we said, okay, now we're gonna tell you how you actually performed. And we presented them with a random score, so it was not really true.
Not even the truth, yeah. No, exactly. It's a little deceptive.
So we were the first one to lie. And after that, we asked them to convince an expert in lie detection, which was, of course, not an expert in lie detection. So we asked them to convince these experts, like, have you seen Lie to Me, the TV show?
No.
There's an expert in light detection. So we presented this researcher as an expert, and we told the participants, like, okay, now you have to convince them, whatever the actual score is, that you performed among the best. So they had to perform. At that point, they had to perform. So we had, like, maybe they received an actual positive score.
What experimental methods were used to study self-deception?
So it was the truth, no? You say, okay, you did good. Now tell me you did good. And you say, well, yeah, I did good. So that's a true answer. Or maybe I told you, you did bad. You did really bad. 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
I'm great. Yeah, I love that. That's such a fun experiment. Okay, so what did you end up finding for those who didn't do well or perhaps didn't do well but were told they did well randomly? That's an interesting group, the ones that probably know they did badly or they just got lucky and they're still convincing everyone that they're great.
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.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is self-deception and how does it manifest?
0:04–1:04
2
How does the body respond to self-deception?
1:04–3:56
3
What experimental methods were used to study self-deception?
3:56–5:47
4
What were the findings regarding confidence and self-deception?
5:47–7:54
5
How does self-deception relate to social perceptions?
7:54–9:49
6
What role does anxiety play in lying and self-deception?
9:49–10:12
7
Why do people self-deceive and what are the evolutionary implications?
10:12–10:14