Cold-blooded women can detect lies with greater accuracy than other women; less empathic women are less affected by emotional contagion and thus may be more able to focus on non-emotional cues

Cold-blooded women can detect lies with greater accuracy than other women. Geoffrey Duran, François-Xavier Cécillon, Thibaut Sansorgné & George A. Michael. The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, Volume 30, 2019 - Issue 3, Dec 26 2018. https://doi.org/10.1080/14789949.2018.1560488

ABSTRACT: Lies are notoriously difficult to detect. But it appears that some people are better at accomplishing this task than others even though the factors contributing to deception detection accuracy are not well understood. This study explored the influence of empathy on the detection of deception as a function of the detectors’ gender while dark personality traits were statistically controlled. Eighty men and 80 women were requested to judge whether individuals viewed in videos were giving their true opinion or not on current debatable issues (50% truthful and 50% deceptive narratives). Judges were divided into four groups according to their gender and their degree of empathy, as assessed using the Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy. It was found that women with lower levels of empathy distinguished false from true opinions better than women with higher empathy, whereas no such difference was found in men. These results suggest that the degree of empathy in women influences their ability to detect deception and supports recent studies showing that emotional skills negatively affect deception detection ability. We suggest that less empathic women are less affected by emotional contagion and thus may be more able to focus on non-emotional cues that might reveal deception.

KEYWORDS: Empathy, gender, deception detection

Check also Atkinson, Dominick Joseph, "What makes a good liar? The relationship between cognitive and personality assessments’ and lying ability using traditional and strategic interview approaches" (2019). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 17392. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2019/12/what-makes-good-liar-relationship.html

And Our experiments support the widely documented poor ability of humans to detect lies holds for both self-selected and instructed liars:

Human Lie-Detection Performance: Does Random Assignment versus Self-Selection of Liars and Truth-Tellers Matter? Karl Ask, Sofia Calderon, Erik Mac Giolla. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, December 25 2019. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2019/12/our-experiments-support-widely.html

And Personality traits of a good liar: A systematic review of the literature. Monica Semrad, Bridie Scott-Parker, Michael Nagel. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 147, 1 September 2019, Pages 306-316. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2019/05/we-still-have-no-tests-to-determine.html