Profile

I’m from the Rhondda Fach originally, which is a small valley in Wales once famous for its coal mining, and still holds some fame through the TV show The Valleys, the hymn Cwm Rhondda (which you may know as Bread of Heaven), its cycling trails, and more. I was a pupil at Ferndale Community School.

Board gaming is a surprisingly active hobby. They are sometimes called designer board games and modern board games, if you wanted to run an internet search on it. There are thousands of new board games published each year! My personal collection (pictures below) has around 130 board games at this point, but it’s still growing…

Here’s a statement: “I studied for my doctorate at UCL”. Do you think this is a lie or a truth? Maybe you think it’s a lie: you read elsewhere that I am from South Wales, so maybe it’s likely that I would have studied there. Or maybe you think this is the truth because, let’s face it, why would I bother lying seeing as there is nothing at stake?

How we make the decision to judge if someone is lying or telling the truth is what I am interested in. It turns out that people tend to guess that others are telling the truth instead of thinking that maybe they are lying. Why do we guess truth more often than lie? This has been the question at the core of my research for the past 13 years.

That’s a long time to try to answer one question, I grant you! But here’s the thing: answering a question takes months to obtain the data and analyse it, more time for replications of the study in the same and other labs, time to write and publish, and there are many possible explanations to explore. For example, do we guess others are telling the truth because it’s a social nicety to be polite? Or is it because of the way that we understand how language works? Is there a built-in error in our minds? Or, as I’m arguing, might this tendency to guess others are telling the truth actually be showing us that people are making smart and informed judgements? That might sound surprising: How can we be being smart if we are believing people who might be lying to us? But that’s the fun part of science: this sort of creative thinking can lead to big breakthroughs.

You might be wondering at this point: “why do you care about this? Isn’t lie detection just a party trick at best?” Making the lie-truth judgement is critical to understanding issues such as:

1. Why do we believe fraudulent text messages and emails are genuine?
2. Why do social care workers believe parents who say they are not harming their child when actually the child is being harmed?
3. What leads us to trust politicians and others in positions of power, and what happens when they abuse this position and deceive us?
4. Should negotiation offers be trusted as genuine or are they hiding their real offer?

And much more. This decision feeds into so many parts of our lives. And by understanding the theory of how people make the judgement, we are in a position to begin to understand how we can change it.

I get to work around 9am, which sometimes means working from my home office and sometimes from my desk. On a given day, I will have students that I am directly supervising needing some guidance. I am running a few experiments at the moment, which means bringing people into the lab and getting them to complete tasks. But research also means writing reports and reading about the research that other people are conducting. I try to switch off at 5pm if I can, but things crop up and so I might have to work longer to manage them.

The work is very varied, so it’s very tricky to answer this question!