The Use Of Unconscious Thought In Simple Distraction Tasks Is Beneficial To Lie Detection

The conventional wisdom is that the thought is conscious.However,recent researches have shown that the processing results of unconscious thought is better than that of conscious thought when it comes to solving some complex problems.The research of unconscious thought has broken the conventional concept “Thinking hard will have good results”,and it has become one of the hot issues in the field of social cognitive research.Existing research shows that in the fields of persuasion,moral judgment,talent selection,and creative problem solving,unconscious thought has shown superior effect over conscious thought.However,research in the field of unconscious thought and lie detection has not yielded consistent results.The latest research found that unconscious thought is affected by variables such as the difficulty of decision-making tasks,thought set,goal types,information presentation methods,and the authenticity of task situations.What's more,the difficulty of distracting tasks also directly affects the processing of information by unconscious thought.In the existing researches on unconscious thought and lie detection,the difficulty of distracting tasks is not controlled.Therefore,this research explores whether simple distraction tasks are conducive to unconscious thought in detecting lies compared to difficult distraction tasks.In this research,the unconscious thought research paradigm was adopted.In experiment 1,the 2-back task(complex distraction task)and listening songs(simple distraction task)were used to compare the detection accuracy of unconscious thought with that of conscious thought on emotional lie video materials under distracting tasks of different difficulties.It was found that,the lie detection accuracy of the listening songs unconscious thought group was higher than that of the 2-back task unconscious thought group which was not significantly different from that of conscious thought group.In order to exclude distraction task on the basis of different type rather than the cause of the difficulty caused by the experimental results,experiment 2 replaced the distraction tasks with the same type but different difficulties' task,listening to remember the lyrics(complex distraction task)and listening songs(simple distraction task).The results found that unconscious thought group of listening songs has higher lie detection accuracy than listening to remember the lyrics unconscious thought group.Experiment 3 tried to extend the research results to factual lies,changed theexperimental materials and added an immediate decision group to exclude the possibility of extracting online judgment from unconscious thought.The results also found that compared with the listening to remember the lyrics unconscious thought group,the conscious thought group and the immediate decision group,the listening songs unconscious thought group showed superior effect of lie detection,and the results of the immediate decision group were not significantly different from that of conscious group,which supported the view that unconscious thought is an offline judgment.Based on the above experiments,this research shows that simple distraction tasks are more conducive than that of complex distraction tasks on the accuracy of unconscious thought lie detection.