It takes one to know one: Psychopathy and deception detection

Abstract

We investigated primary and secondary psychopathy and the ability to detect high-stakes, real-life emotional lies in an on-line experiment (N = 150). Using signal detection analysis, we found that lie detection ability was overall above chance level, but that there was a tendency towards responding liberally to the test stimuli. We also observed that women were more accurate than men, and that age had a positive relationship with higher accuracy. Further, sex moderated the relationship between psychopathy and lie detection ability; in men, primary psychopathy had a significant, positive correlation with lie detection ability, whereas in women we saw an indication that secondary psychopathy might be associated with better detection accuracy. The results are discussed with a reference to evolutionary theory and sex differences in processing socio-emotional information.