Little white lies increase in the digital world
Posted September 8, 2013 11:13 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It’s hard enough to tell when someone’s lying to your face – but what about digitally?
If you’ve ever been in the middle of a text messaging conversation and the other person takes a long time to respond to one of your texts, you should be suspicious.
A new study out of Brigham Young University shows there’s a good chance that person is lying.
Researchers got 100 students to answer 30 questions by text, and lie in half the responses. They found the untruthful responses took roughly 10 per cent longer to create because more edits were made to the responses.
Previous studies have shown we can only tell if someone’s lying 54 per cent of the time – but that number goes way down online, when we can’t hear a voice or see facial expressions.
Researchers caution that doesn’t mean someone is lying every time they take a awhile to text you back – it could just be real life getting in the way.
