Best way to deceive someone is to maintain a full bladder

Want to convince someone of your lies? Drink a lot of fluids before you commence your deceit, a study recommends (kind of). Research from the California State University looked at whether people who have better control of their bladder are able to lie better.

As part of the test, 22 students were asked to participate in a questionnaire on a number of controversial issues. They were then asked to drink different amount of water – either 700ml or 50ml in what they thought was an unrelated study. Three quarters of an hour later, when the water had made its way to the bladder, the students were then interviewed by a panel about the questionnaire, but were asked to lie about two of the issues that were on the survey.

The panellists found that it was more difficult to detect lies from those who had drunk the larger volume of water, or subsequently had the fuller bladder.

"In the high-control, but not the low-control condition, liars displayed significantly fewer behavioural cues to deception, more behavioural cues signalling truth, and provided longer and more complex accounts than truth-tellers. Observers revealed bias toward perceiving [such] liars as truth-tellers," the study, to be published in the December volume of Consciousness and Cognition Journal, reads.

Study author Iris Blandon-Gitlin explained to the New Scientists that although it is typically thought that bladder control and impulse control are different, they are both have common neural resources. She told the news outlet: "They are subjectively different but in the brain they are not. They are not domain-specific. When you activate the inhibitory control network in one domain, the benefits spill over to other tasks."