Teaching a psychopath to lie is easier than training your dog to sit

Psychopaths may not always lie, but they’ll always be better at lying than others.

That’s according to research from the University of Hong Kong that assessed the lying capabilities of students who exhibited varying levels of psychopathic traits.

Each of the 52 students studied was shown a series of pictures before being asked if they knew the people photographed. They were told to give a truthful or untruthful response, and researchers measured their reaction time and brain activity with fMRI technology. The students repeated the exercise after a training session.

Participants with high psychopathic traits (29 out of the 52) answered much quicker than their first try after the training session, researchers said. The people with lower levels of psychopathic traits did not answer any quicker or slower after the training session.

The fMRI images of the brains of people with high psychopathic traits also showed less activity around these processes, while the brains of people with low psychopathic traits showed an increase. The researchers said this shows that people with low-level traits have to exert more effort to lie than those with higher levels.

High psychopathy is characterised by untruthfulness and manipulativeness. Other common traits include an inability to emphasise, superficiality and insincerity. Dr Tatia Lee, who co-led the study, said lying requires the brain to use processes such as working memory, inhibitory control and conflict resolution and these are more active in people who express the typical psychopathic characteristics.

The term “psychopath” may conjure images of a horror movie or a terrible headline about murder, but a 2016 study from Bond University found that one in five corporate bosses have clinically significant psychopathic traits — the same percentage of psychopathic people in prisons. About one in 100 people in the general population are psychopaths.

Lee said further research is needed to establish the link between lying and psychopathy before its results are applied to the general population since the experiment only sampled a small number of university students. The study is, however, another step forward in understanding how psychopaths operate.

The findings are reported in the journal Translational Psychiatry.

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