On Saturday, 4 May RTL Z will broadcast the BBC Horizon’s documentary ‘A Week Without Lying - The Honesty Experiment’. In this documentary producers wanted to find out whether it is possible to go a week without lying, and rigged three members of the public, a Priest, an Advertising Executive and a Youtuber, with revolutionary new portable lie detection equipment.
Amongst the specialists to monitor their anxiety, movement and speech patterns is Dr Sophie van der Zee, Assistant Professor of Erasmus School of Economics. The detection equipment, which monitors micro changes in body movement, speech patterns and stress levels, made it near impossible for them to lie undetected. The participants were then challenged to go a whole week without being dishonest.
The team of experts from around Europe, including Sophie van der Zee, studied the subjects for a whole week, observing how often and why they lie, and challenged them to live without telling a single lie. Their aim was to discover how much we lie and the impact this has on our society and relationships. The results have caused scientists to rethink everything they thought about how and why we lie. During the week the scientists discovered that we all lie up to nine times a day, which is far more than any previous estimates, and that taking away the ability to fib puts humans under extreme pressure, with all the subjects struggling to live completely honestly.
- Assistant professor
- More information
To watch the documentary, tune in to RTL Z at 8.30 PM (Dutch time) on 4 May 2019. It is also possible to watch the documentary already on RTL XL.