Choosing Friends By Subliminally Spotting Liars
Trusting your intuition instead of identifying traditional lie detection tics such as looking shifty or nervous improves people’s chances of accurately detecting liars, according to new study by US scientists
Psychologists at the University of California suggested people might be selecting friends, lovers and collaborators based on subliminal senses, with liars excluded by unconscious reason.
“What interested us about the unconscious mind is that it just might really be the seat of where accurate lie detection lives,” study chief Dr Leanne ten Brinke told Psychological Science.
“So if our ability to detect lies is not conscious – we simply can’t do this when we’re thinking hard about it – then maybe it lives somewhere else, and so we thought one possible explanation was the unconscious mind.” (BBC: http://bbc.in/1hloxJ2 )
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Their findings contradicted the conclusions of an earlier report published in Psychological Science in 2011 which concludes that trusting gut instinct can lead to ‘costly and dangerous mistakes’ if people rely on it too closely.
“What happens in our bodies really does appear to influence what goes in our minds,” study chief Dr Barnaby Dunn from Cambridge University conceded, ‘We should be careful about following these gut instincts, however, as sometimes they help and sometimes they hinder our decision making.” (Metro: http://bit.ly/1hklZXs )
Decidedly less ambiguous about the importance of trusting one’s gut instinct was British Professor Richard Wiseman, who in a report ‘The loser’s guide to getting lucky’ published in 2003 outlined the key personality traits he discovered in ‘lucky’ people.
“They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities,” he suggested, “Make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”
“Listen to your gut instincts,” he stressed, “they are normally right.”
Uber-successful media entrepreneur Felix Dennis also singled out trusting his instincts as one of the key drivers that allowed him to generate a multi-million pound fortune alongside relentlessly extreme risk-taking which culminated in him taking up smoking crack cocaine at the age of 50.
Recalling spending £2.5million on the drug over five years, he was similarly candid about the moment he decided to stop.
“One day, I was walking around the house with a hammer thinking to myself: ‘When that bastard comes though that skylight, I’m going to give him such a whack…’ he told the Guardian.
“Then I caught myself in a mirror and I thought: Bastard? Skylight? There is no bastard. There is no skylight. And why am I walking around with this hammer?” (Guardian; http://bit.ly/1fzJDCS )
Jonty Skrufff: https://twitter.com/djjontyskrufff
