A new study from Israel claims that the best way to detect if someone is lying
or not is to check their handwriting. Forget the old polygraph, or the infamously ineffective sodium pentathol shot, now all you need is to look at their handwriting. The basic idea is that by the time we are adults our handwriting is fixed– hardwired if you will into an automatic action. When people lie, however, the extra cognitive effort that goes into pulling out an enormous whopper of a porky means the writer tends to unintentionally hesitate and press harder on each pen stroke. This is imperceptible to the naked eye but is detectable to specially programmed computers.
As cool as this sounds I have a couple of issues with the science: The sample was pretty small (only 34 people) to begin with, and the volunteers were only asked to write either true or untrue stories to check the system. I would be interested to see if for the “liars” there is a difference between people who are ostensibly writing fiction (and whose brains would therefore be forced to stop and think), and people who are lying (and could have planned their lie well in advance). My point is, many people who are gifted liars, plan their lies in advance and almost believe the lies they say themselves. Therefore I would be a little skeptical as to how much extra time their brains would need to process the lie.
I would certainly be interested in seeing more research on this though.
One more thing– how many people actually use handwriting these days anyway? Maybe they can devise a liars typing test
The full article is at Mmegi
