Humans can be an untrusting race.
People are often very cynical about human nature, tending to think that strangers will happily lie to us if there is something in it for them.
In a world filled with liars, lack of trust in others is often thought to be a sensible precaution. And to protect ourselves, we need to be suspicious of people we don’t know.
Certainly we have an intuitive belief that people who are more suspicious of others’ motives are likely to be better at detecting lies. Or so Nancy Carter and J. Mark Weber found when they asked a group of MBA students whether people high or low in trust would be better at detecting lies in others (Carter & Weber, 2010).
The results were as we’d expect: 85% thought low trusters are better than high trusters at lie detection.
Is this the right answer though? Are low-trusters really better at detecting lies?
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I have a theory about this based on my own tendency to be very trusting, despite having been betrayed and hurt a lot.
I score extremely high on Intuition in Myers-Briggs type tests and while this makes me fairly good at detecting lies, it is also the reason I tend to be trusting. High Intuitives tend to see to and connect with the depths of a person and feel they know them well in a short space of time. Unfortunately, though they do know the person’s potential and best self well, they don’t sufficiently taken into account the person’s likelihood of acting against their core values through fear, neuroticism or other reasons that will distort their behaviour away from how that person normally is and would like to be. It’s not that they see someone as perfect – they can well see their faults – but they don’t believe the person will behave in the way they do.
That’s another thing about Intuitives, they can get under people’s skin and provoke fear by their ability to know things about a person and that can lead to withdrawal from them or even attack.