Merylin Monaro

I graduated with honors in Clinical Psychology from the University of Padova. In 2018, I received my Ph.D. in Brain, Mind a Computer Science from the same university. Thanks to the interdisciplinarity nature of the Ph.D. program and the collaborations that I have established, I developed several research lines concerning topics between social and behavioral psychology and computer science technologies. My research interests are mainly in the field of social psychology, with particular attention to social cognition and its interaction with technology. One of the most enigmatic and complex aspects of social cognition concerns lying. In the last years, I focused on the study of deception and on the development of intelligent lie detection machines, mostly based on the analysis of the interaction between humans and computers (e.g., mouse tracking, keystroke analysis) and the application of machine learning techniques. I am exploring several research lines that contextualize lies in different scenarios: I studied deception regarding one’s identity and its implications; the problem of fake product reviews; deception in a legal context. Particularly, I studied the phenomenon of malingering or the fabrication of physical and psychological symptoms and the phenomenon of social desirability. Finally, I published some papers concerning other classical social psychology topics: implicit attitudes and prejudice, political orientation, and the study of the consequences of using social networks.