Big Liars Are Truthful About Lying

This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Sophie Bushwick. Got a minute?
Most of us are pretty truthful and even tall tale tellers tell the truth about lying.
Wait, what?
In a survey, more than 500 Amsterdam psychology students reported how often they lied.
Forty-one percent said they told no lies,
51 percent told one to five lies per day, and eight percent told six or more lies a day.
All told, a mere five percent of the students were responsible for 40 percent of the lies.
The study is in the journal Human Communication Research.
Ah, but how can we be sure the participants were honest about lying?
The researchers asked some of the students to play games for a cash reward.
Lying could earn them extra money.
But they did not know that researchers could tell when they cheated.
And the big cheaters were the liars who admitted that they fibbed.
Their honesty suggests they feel little remorse about lying.
Which jibes with tests that find that liars tend to get higher scores for psychopathic traits.
And that's the truth.
Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Sophie Bushwick.