Do you know when someone is lying to you by message?

Lying in writing is common, especially with so many text tools in place to facilitate dialogue between people. Since the messages are sent by people who are not present, it is difficult to understand what is indicative of a lie.

Cornell University research has been conducted to find out precisely what verbal and textual clues a person gives when not telling the truth.

The team of scientists analyzed a large archive of data from text conversations that were sent by hundreds of men and women. Previous work had already been done to uncover these clues of lie through the written text, but the samples analyzed were often very small.

Dice

What was known, for example, is that when someone wants to lie verbally in a personal dialogue, they tend to use more personal pronouns and make vaguer sentences with less complex language and shorter sentences.

To compare the information, Cornell's researchers began with 1, 703 text conversations and, after eliminating all those that had no lying content, ended up with 351.

In these conversations, both men and women use longer sentences when they are lying - women are 13% longer, and men have 2% longer sentences.

More clues

When they lie, both they and they tend to use uncommitting phrases, using words like "probably" and "maybe." One big difference the researchers noticed was in college students, who use 25% longer sentences when they are lying, but it is not clear yet why they do so.

Basically, women and men use bigger sentences and words like “maybe” and “possibly” when lying via text message. For now, this is just a few clues, and more studies need to be done accordingly.

However, if you think someone has been lying to you, start paying attention to both the use of these words and the length of each sentence - it may not be proof, but it is a good indication.