The Unconscious Detects Lies

One of the great paradoxes of human beings is that a good part of their wisdom does not reside in their consciousness but in their unconscious. This body of knowledge is generally called intuition. It is a hidden knowledge, which is in us. And science has been able to verify that the unconscious detects lies.

Even if we don’t notice it at the conscious level, we do have some kind of internal lie detector. This is able to identify the signals sent by the behavior of people who lie. So we unknowingly know that they are trying to deceive us.

But why do we sometimes let people cheat us? Even if the unconscious mind detects lies,  we do not always pay attention to those intuitive impulses that reveal it to us. Strange as it may sound, sometimes we also intentionally fall into deception.

There is no such thing as a perfect lie

Suppose someone is trying to tell the perfect lie. To achieve this, that person must first develop a carefully structured narrative. Each piece of the lie must fit perfectly with the others and the whole must be believable. This version should then be coordinated with what she will say later. The effort is monumental.

Even if she manages to build a whole story perfectly cohesive, that is not enough. She should also master her body language to perfection. In other words, don’t hesitate, don’t show that she is hiding something. His gaze should remain fixed, his pupils quiet, his hands in a relaxed position.

Lying to perfection is a superhuman feat. There may only be one or two people in the world who can do this.  But for the common man, it’s mission impossible. And that is precisely why the unconscious detects lies. In a fraction of a second, it identifies and interprets signals that go beyond words. This allows him to notice the deception.

The unconscious detects lies, according to an experiment

The Association for Psychological Science  has published research in which the subconscious has been shown to detect lies. The results of the study appeared in the prestigious journal  Psychological Science. No doubt is possible. Researchers have claimed that the majority of people are very bad at consciously identifying deceptions. About 54% of people do not realize that they are being lied to.

Researchers suspected the subconscious of detecting lies, even when the person did not consciously realize it or take into account what these deep areas of the mind were telling them. To prove this theory, they used a group of 72 volunteers. A video was shown to them. We see people who have stolen $100 and others who are innocent.

Each of these people explained it and the participants had to decide whether they were guilty or innocent. Only 43% of participants gave the correct answer. But the researchers didn’t stop there. They measured their unconscious responses to each of the people in the video. Thus, they were able to verify that the vast majority of people were indeed able to associate the culprits with terms like “dishonesty” and vice versa.

Why does this paradox take place?

So far, the reasons why there is such a strong contrast between the conscious and the unconscious (in terms of the capacity to pick up on deceptions) could not be established with exactitude. Apparently, everything has to do with our tendency to give more credibility to intellectual content than to intuitive content. We listen to the voice of reason but we are deaf to the rumors of instinct.

In addition,  we know that there are situations in which the victim of deception wants to participate. The most typical case occurs during certain episodes of infidelity. Deceived people are used to saying that they “didn’t notice anything”. When we carefully examine these types of situations, we discover that there are a whole lot of clues that the victim had not wanted to pay attention to. In these cases, the unconscious detects the lies but the conscience refuses to admit the obvious so as not to have a painful experience.

All of this leads us to believe that  paying attention to the messages of our intuition can be a good idea. We must stop thinking that our reason is the only one that holds the keys to the truth. We are not only reason or heart: we are also intuition. And intuition holds an important source of wisdom.

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