Cognovo research fellow Raluca Briazu and her three co-authors Clare R. Walsh, Catherine Deeprose, and Giorgio Ganis, publish in Cognition. The article, entitled 'Undoing the past in order to lie in the present: counterfactual thinking and deceptive communication', is the first article to establish a direct link between counterfactual thinking and lying. The paper describes four studies which highlight that the imagination of alternatives to the past can enable participants to come up with more lies whilst also prompting them to actually use these lies when necessary. The link is established both in terms of individual differences as well as experimentally through the use of hypothetical scenarios and behavioural tasks.
Raluca is working on Cognovo Poject 19 which aims to investigate the role of counterfactual thinking in deception. The results in this recently published paper form the basis on Raluca's thesis. The thesis also aims to investigate how affect derived through counterfactual thinking can modulate the relationship. Additionally, a clinical study in Parkinson's Disease also aims to established whether the relationship between counterfactual thinking and deception is underscored by executive function mechanisms.