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Use the best, ignore the rest: How heuristics allow to tell a lie from the truth

Could a simple rule of thumb help to find the truth? People struggle with integrating many putative cues to deception into an accurate veracity judgement. Heuristics simplify difficult decisions by ignoring most of the information and relying instead only on a few but highly diagnostic cues (’Use the best, ignore the rest’). We examined whether people would be able to tell lie from truth when instructed to make decisions based on a single, diagnostic cue (verifiability and richness in detail). We show that these simple judgements by lay people allowed to discriminate dishonest from honest statements. These judgements performed at or above state-of-the-art, resource-intensive content analysis by trained coders. For a tech- and training-free approach, heuristics were surprisingly accurate, and hold promise for practice.