Liars are found to take longer to text back, according to a new study released Monday.
The researchers of the study suggest that liars take longer to respond to text messages and online chat. The study authors from the University of Nebraska-Omaha, Bringham Young University and the University of Arizona say college students who were told to tell some lies to a chat box took longer to write their lies, and they also made more edit to the untruthful messages as opposed to truthful messages.
About 100 students were called to participate in the study. Each student was asked to respond to messages from a computer. The system gave them about 30 questions each and they were instructed to lie to half of the questions.
The study finds liars wrote shorter messages than those telling the truth. "Digital conversations are a fertile ground for deception because people can easily conceal their identity and their messages often appear credible," BYU professor of information systems Tom Meservy said in a news release. "Unfortunately, humans are terrible at detecting deception. We're creating methods to correct that."
The researchers say the results could help create a program that would automatically flag when a person may be lying online. It could be useful for a wide range of things beyond conversations among friends, including online dating or customer service exchanges.
Maservy also said that it is almost impossible for humans to detect deception and that is why they are creating methods to correct such. The study is set to be published online this week in the journal ACM Transactions on Management.
