The Application of Semantic Reaction Time in The Separation of Deceptive and Non-Deceptive People

Understanding and analyzing the human mind and behavior provides valuable data to discover criminals and free innocent people. The cognitive activity related to deception can be evaluated by the semantic reaction time measurement method, as a behavioral component of cognitive activity. The purpose of this research was to determine the difference in semantic reaction time in people with and without deception (lying) and this issue was investigated whether it is possible to use a precise tool to measure the response time of people to specific questions about truth concluded their answers. In this research, this time was measured using the semantic reaction time measurement task, which is a computer program. According to its goals, this research was of fundamental-applied type, and in terms of data collection method, it was semi-experimental with repeated measurements. The research sample was 28 people who willingly participated in this project in 2019. The research variables include the situational independent variable with two situations: 1) deception; 2) No cheating. The dependent variable was semantic reaction time and the control variables were male gender, age over twenty years, high school diploma and right-handedness. In this research, the exact delay time in answering the questions was calculated with the accuracy of one thousandth of a second, and based on the results, the hypothesis of the research was that the semantic reaction time in deceptive (false) answers to questions is longer than non-deceptive (true) answers. It was confirmed with a significance level of 0.001.