More intelligent extraverts are more likely to deceive.

The tendency to lie is a part of personality. But are personality traits the only factors that make some people lie more often than others? We propose that cognitive abilities have equal importance. People with higher cognitive abilities are better, and thus more effective liars. This might reinforce using lies to solve problems. Yet, there is no empirical research that shows this relationship in healthy adults. Here we present three studies in which the participants had free choice about their honesty. We related differences in cognitive abilities and personality to the odds of lying. Results show that personality and intelligence are both important. People low on agreeableness and intelligent extraverts are most likely to lie. This suggests that intelligence might mediate the relationship between personality traits and lying frequency. While personality traits set general behavioral tendencies, intelligence and environment set boundaries.

Working Memory Training for Schoolchildren Improves Working Memory, with No Transfer Effects on Intelligence.

Working memory contributes to many higher-order cognitive processes and predicts general cognitive skills. It is therefore important to know if its functions are trainable. In this study we investigated the malleability of working memory processes in schoolchildren whose cognitive functions are still developing. We also analyzed transfer effects to both general and specific intellectual skills. To address these issues, we examined the effectiveness of working memory training (10 training sessions) in terms of practice effects (trained tasks), near-transfer effects (working memory capacity), and far-transfer effects (psychometric intelligence). Sixty-nine children aged 8-10 participated in the study. The experimental group (42 children) participated in working memory training that intensely engaged the updating function of working memory. The training tasks, implemented as computer games, were based on the n-back and keep track paradigms. There was also an active control group (27 children). The results suggest that the experimental group improved their working memory capacity, as measured with both trained and untrained tasks. Regarding intelligence, far-transfer effects were weak and may be attributed to mere repetition of measurements. Moreover, whereas improvement in the training tasks could be observed after 15 months, the far-transfer effects disappeared in the delayed assessment.

Explicit Instructions Increase Cognitive Costs of Deception in Predictable Social Context.

Convincing participants to deceive remains one of the biggest and most important challenges of laboratory-based deception research. The simplest and most prevalent method involves explicitly instructing participants to lie or tell the truth before presenting each task item. The usual finding of such experiments is increased cognitive load associated with deceptive responses, explained by necessity to inhibit default and automatic honest responses. However, explicit instructions are usually coupled with the absence of social context in the experimental task. Context plays a key role in social cognition by activating prior knowledge, which facilitates behaviors consistent with the latter. We hypothesized that in the presence of social context, both honest and deceptive responses can be produced on the basis of prior knowledge, without reliance on truth and without additional cognitive load during deceptive responses. In order to test the hypothesis, we have developed Speed-Dating Task (SDT), which is based on a real-life social event. In SDT, participants respond both honestly and deceptively to questions in order to appear similar to each of the dates. The dates are predictable and represent well-known categories (i.e., atheist or conservative). In one condition participants rely on explicit instructions preceding each question (external cue). In the second condition no explicit instructions are present, so the participants need to adapt based on prior knowledge about the category the dates belong to (internal cue). With internal cues, reaction times (RTs) are similar for both honest and deceptive responses. However, in the presence of external cues (EC), RTs are longer for deceptive than honest responses, suggesting that deceptive responses are associated with increased cognitive load. Compared to internal cues, deception costs were higher when EC were present. However, the effect was limited to the first part of the experiment, only partially confirming our initial hypothesis. The results suggest that the presence of social context in deception tasks might have a significant influence on cognitive processes associated with deception.