People who grow up under stressful conditions tend to score lower on conventional assessments of cognitive abilities. They might, however, develop enhanced mental skills and abilities for solving problems that are more ecologically relevant to them. We present 2 studies examining whether psychosocial adversity (i.e., exposure to neighborhood violence and to harsh parenting) enhances the ability to detect deception. Our results, based on Signal Detection and Bayesian analyses, are mixed. In Study 1, we find no support for our hypothesis that exposure to psychosocial adversity enhances deception detection ability. In Study 2, we do find that only harsher parenting predicts greater accuracy. This evidence is either weak or strong, depending on whether we compare our hypothesis to the null hypothesis or an impairment model, respectively. In both studies, we find no relationship between neighborhood violence and accuracy. Although the implications of our findings are modest, we hope they will encourage future research focused on the skills and abilities of people who develop in harsh environments.

Growing up in a harsh environment (e.g., a dangerous neighborhood) has profound and possibly lasting impacts on cognition. People who develop in such environments tend to score lower on assessments of cognitive abilities (e.g., IQ, inhibition), which predict significant life outcomes (e.g., health, wealth, longevity; Ellis, Bianchi, Griskevicius, & Frankenhuis, 2017; Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013). The prevailing view among scientists, clinicians, and policymakers is, therefore, that harsh environments impair cognition.

Frankenhuis and de Weerth (2013) have challenged this consensus by proposing the specialization hypothesis: Harsh environments do not exclusively impair cognition; rather, people’s minds also become developmentally tailored, or “specialized,” for problem solving relevant in such environments (see also Ellis et al., 2017). These problems may require different mental skills from those assessed on conventional tests of cognitive abilities (e.g., the Raven’s Progressive Matrices). For instance, in unpredictable environments, frequent attention shifting...