Honesty Via Distraction
From Triver’s book Folly of Fools:
When a person is placed under cognitive load (by having to memorize a string of numbers while making a moral evaluation), the individual does not express the usual bias toward self. But when the same evaluation is made absent cognitive load, a strong bias emerges in favor of seeing oneself acting more fairly than another individual doing the identical action. This suggests that build deeply in us is a mechanism that tries to make universally just evaluations, but that after the fact, “higher” faculties paint the matter in our favor. (p.22)
This suggests an interesting way to avoid bias – make judgements fast under distracting cognitive load.
Cognitive load makes people also prone to all sorts of attribution errors and anchoring (see Gilbert 1989, 90 etc).It is probably a joke, but that basically means "bring it on, System 1!"
I immediately think of "stress positions" and other features of interrogation. The purpose in interrogation is to get information that the possessor doesn't want to give up accurately. Putting this person in a situation where his mind is highly occupied with other things (dealing with fear of drowing, falling, and so on) presumably makes him a LOT less clever at telling lies that will mask the truth.
If the mind is busy doing other stuff, it doesn't have bandwidth to lie. Who knew.