Guilt, Lying, and Attentional Avoidance of Concealed Information

Abstract

We investigated whether or not liars, as compared to truth tellers, would have an attentional bias for concealed information. To identify attentional avoidant patterns in liars, we measured their eye movements with an eye tracker. The participants were 54 students who had made their own choice about which of 2 groups they would join: the guilty group (n = 27), who were presented with a theft-crime mission to perform, or the nonguilty group (n = 27), who were presented with a legal mission. During the deception detection process, the eye tracker was used to measure participants' attentional bias according to their eye movements while they were presented with pairs of crime-relevant, crime-irrelevant, and neutral stimuli. Results showed that both the guilty and nonguilty groups speedily detected crime-relevant stimuli, but the guilty group became avoidant toward these stimuli, whereas the nonguilty group did not display an avoidant pattern.