Lying becomes automatic with practice, study says

NBC:

You can get better at lying with more practice, a recent study suggests.

Researchers found that with a little training, people can learn to tell a lie more automatically and efficiently. It gets easier for folks to repeat the lies and becomes harder for them to differentiate deception from telling the truth.

The idea that lying becomes easier with more practice comes on the heels of news from the sports world of two high-profile athletes publicly admitting their tall tales. It’s something cyclist Lance Armstrong and Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o may have both discovered while repeating their own lies about not using performance enhancing drugs or the “death” of Te’o’s fake online girlfriend even after learning he was the victim of a hoax.

In this small study, published in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Science, scientists looked at whether lying can be trained to become more automatic and a less demanding task for the brain. The research involved 48 college students from China who were assigned to either an instruction group, a training group, or a control group.

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