Too exhausted to see the truth: Ego depletion and the ability to detect deception

Abstract

In two experiments, recent findings showing the detrimental role of regulatory depletion in decision making are extended to the field of deception detection. In both experiments, the state of ego depletion was induced by having judges inhibit versus non-inhibit a dominant response while transcribing a text. Subsequently they judged true or deceptive messages of different stimulus persons with regard to their truthfulness. In both experiments, ego-depleted judges scored significantly lower on detection accuracy than control judges. Signal detection measures showed that this effect was not due to differences in judgmental bias between the two conditions. In Experiment 2, it was shown that the lower detection accuracy in the state of ego depletion was due to a feeling of difficulty of relying on verbal content information. Practical implications of the current findings are discussed.

Individual Differences Predicting Impression Management Detection in Job Interviews

“…For instance, consistent with dual-process theory, people facing higher cognitive load tend to rely heavily on (less valid) nonverbal cues to judge credibility (Reinhard & Sporer, 2008). Moreover, when individuals' cognitive resources are reduced (e.g., by an ego depletion task), they experience more difficulties to analyze verbal cues and achieve lower detection accuracy (Reinhard, Scharmach, & Stahlberg, 2013). Similarly, individuals with high need for cognition (i.e., with a higher motivation to engage in effortful cognitive endeavors) do engage in systematic information processing when facing low (vs. high) cognitive load and are better at detecting deception (Reinhard, 2010).…”

Too tired to taint the truth: Ego‐depletion reduces other‐benefiting dishonesty

“…Third, our findings provide a fundament for further research on the types of dishonesty and self‐control resource involvement. Research on ego‐depletion and lying detection showed that people are worse at lie detection when self‐control resources are limited (Reinhard, Scharmach, & Stahlberg, ), and it would be interesting to see whether this relationship holds true regardless of the type of lie.…”

A new perspective on the interplay between self-control and cognitive performance: Modeling progressive depletion patterns

“…Since weak ego-depletion effects on performance might be due to unfulfilled requirements for overriding habits during the ego-depletion manipulation task [56, 57, 58], we applied a handwriting task as a well-established and valid ego-depletion manipulation (cf. e.g., [17, 28, 58, 59, 60]) that has also been used to investigate ego-depletion effects in school children (e.g., [18]). All students were instructed to transcribe a text about the history of the city of Mannheim, Germany.…”