The findings, published in Psychological Science, raise questions about a time-honored experimental technique, said John Protzko, a University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) cognitive scientist who co-led the study with colleague Claire Zedelius.
“The method of ‘answer quickly and without thinking’, a long staple in psychological research, may be doing many things, but one thing it does is make people lie to you and tell you what they think you want to hear,” Protzko said. “This may mean we have to revisit the interpretation of a lot of research findings that use the ‘answer quickly’ technique.
“The idea has always been that we have a divided mind — an intuitive, animalistic type and a more rational type,” he continued. “And the more rational type is assumed to always be constraining the lower order mind. If you ask people to answer quickly and without thinking, it’s supposed to give you sort of a secret access to that lower order mind.”
Read the complete article from Association for Psychological Science here: Under Time Pressure, People Tell Us What We Want to Hear