Psych at Work

I stumbled across this article (about Aldert Vrij's new study in Applied Cognitive Psychology) and I think it's so cool that I absolutely had to share it. Basically, scientists had police and military participants draw out a mission they'd been on and half were supposed to act truthfully and half were to lie. An important difference in the drawings was the presence (or absence) of the agent on the mission. The liars tended not to draw this person while truth-tellers did - the authors reported that 80% of truth-tellers and 87% of liars could be identified this way. That absolutely has to be one of the best rates I've ever seen in a study like this...

For some reason it reminds me of response scales where individuals are asked to draw something and that distance corresponds to some construct. For example, there's a way to measure body image by having individuals draw marks indicating how big they think their own shoulders or waist or whatever are and then researchers measure that distance and compare to the true size measure of the person (similar to the self-ideal discrepancy measures). The discrepancy between the drawn marks and the actual human's size show the person's distorted body image (how distorted the individual's perception of their own image is).