Tell a tall tale and watch a narcissist fail: Narcissism and lie detection via email

Abstract

People are bad at detecting lies, tending to perform just above chance. There is little previous literature on whether individual traits are associated with better lie detection abilities. No research that we know of looks at the association between narcissistic traits and lie detection ability. However, some work has found that narcissistic people are better at detecting emotions in face to face interactions. In this paper, we examine the relationship between narcissism and lie detection ability across two studies. The first study examines the association between narcissism and lie detection ability in emails. People who scored high in narcissism preformed significantly worse in the email lie detection task, but they were significantly more confident in their abilities to detect the lies. This means that narcissistic people are erroneously confident in their lie detection abilities. The second study aimed to replicate the findings of the first study. Additionally, the second study added a video-taped lie detection task. We were not able to replicate the findings of the first study. We also found no associations between narcissism and lie detection abilities in video-taped interactions.