来源：《新科学家》
原文刊登日期：2021年1月13日
When telling a lie, men may imitate the body language of other men they are lying to without realising they are doing it. The discovery might eventually lead to a new form of lie detection test.
当男人撒谎时，他们可能会无意识地模仿其说谎对象的肢体语言。这一发现可能最终导致一种新的测谎测试。
“Liars often deliberately change their behaviour into a way they think truth-tellers behave, but this particular copycat behaviour is something they wouldn’t even try to manipulate because they don’t realise they’re doing it,” says Sophie van der Zee at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. “And that could make it an interesting cue for detecting deceit.”
荷兰鹿特丹伊拉斯谟大学的索菲•范德齐表示：“说谎者经常故意改变自己的行为，使其看起来像他们所认为的诚实人的行为方式，但他们甚至不会试图操纵这种模仿行为，因为他们没有意识到自己在这么做。这可能会成为检测欺骗的有趣线索。”
Van der Zee and her colleagues asked about 50 male university students to solve a supposedly simple wooden puzzle within 5 minutes. In reality, the puzzle was far too hard to solve in the time available.
范德齐和她的同事要求大约50名男性大学生在5分钟内解决一个看似简单的木制拼图。实际上，这个题很难，在有限的时间内无法解决。
Van der Zee “hid” the puzzle solutions in the room where the students could find them, which encouraged the students to cheat. She then asked the students not to tell her supervisor that she had “accidentally” left the solutions in the room because she feared professional consequences.
范德齐把答案“藏”在学生能找到的房间里，这鼓励了学生作弊。然后，她要求学生不要告诉她的导师，她“不小心”把解决方案留在了房间里，因为她担心会带来职业上的后果。
Van der Zee and her colleagues then recorded interviews as each student told another male student about the puzzle challenge – which, if they were complying with van der Zee’s request, involved lying about how they solved the puzzle.
范德齐和她的同事们随后记录下了每个男生向另一名男生讲述拼图挑战的过程——如果他们遵照范德齐的要求，就包括在如何解决拼图的问题上撒谎。
Using a wireless accelerometer, van der Zee’s team recorded the head, chest and wrist movements of the students – both the ones talking about the puzzle and the ones listening. They found that when a student was telling the truth, their body movements differed from those of the person asking questions. But when they were lying, the movements of the two speakers tended to align.
范德齐的研究小组使用无线加速计记录了学生们的头部、胸部和手腕的运动——包括谈论谜题的学生和正在听谜题的学生。他们发现，当学生说真话时，他们的身体动作与提问者不同。但当他们说谎的时候，问答两者的动作趋于一致。
This may be because lying requires so much concentration, says van der Zee, so speakers might subconsciously slip into mimicking their listener’s subtlest body movements because copying requires less thinking than coming up with their own body language. This way of coping with “cognitive overload” isn’t obvious to the naked eye, but was detectable with the accelerometers.
范德齐说，这可能是因为撒谎需要太多的注意力，所以说谎者可能会下意识地模仿听者最细微的身体动作，因为模仿比想出自己的身体语言需要更少的思考。这种应对“认知过载”的方式肉眼看不出来，但可以通过加速计检测到。
It is a “fascinating” study that provides good “basic research” for possible future courtroom use if validated in more in-depth studies, says Tim Brennen at the University of Oslo in Norway.
挪威奥斯陆大学的Brennen说，这是一项“令人着迷的”研究，如果在更深入的研究中得到验证，它将为未来可能在法庭上使用提供良好的“基础研究”。
However, the accelerometer results don’t determine which speaker – the liar or the listener – is aligning body language with whom, a shortcoming the study authors themselves point out.
然而，加速度计的结果并不能确定是哪个说话者——说谎者还是听者——在与谁协调肢体语言，这是研究作者自己指出的一个缺点。
“It’s really interesting in terms of social psychological theory, but this is just the first green shoots as far as having something practical for reliable lie detection testing,” says Brennen.
Brennen说：“就社会心理学理论而言，这真的很有趣，但这只是可靠的测谎测试的实际应用的第一个萌芽”。