Liars Take Longer to Respond to Text Messages

Researchers at the Brigham Young University have found that liars take longer to reply to digital messages such as texts. Also, liars are more likely to edit their messages and send shorter replies.

Humans can detect lies about 54 percent of the time, which is only slightly better than a coin-flip. In the digital world, it is even easier for people to lie, according to Tom Meservy, BYU professor of information systems.

"Digital conversations are a fertile ground for deception because people can easily conceal their identity and their messages often appear credible," Meservy said in a news release. "Unfortunately, humans are terrible at detecting deception. We're creating methods to correct that."

Previously, a related study had found some tell-tale signs of liars. According to that study, people who were lying online (such as a dating site) tend to avoid using first-person pronoun- I- as they feel guilty about the deception.

The current study even included University of Nebraska and the University of Arizona researchers who analyzed digital conversations for any clues that could help them detect liars.

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.

Researchers found that students tended to take 10 percent more time to lie and even edited the text more often.

"We are starting to identify signs given off by individuals that aren't easily tracked by humans," Meservy said. "The potential is that chat-based systems could be created to track deception in real-time."

Meservy and Jeffrey Jenkins, also from BYU, warn that people mustn't simply assume that the other person is lying just because he/she is taking a long time to reply to text messages.

In the next stage of the study, researchers will be tracking human deception.

 "We are just at the beginning of this," Jenkins said. "We need to collect a lot more data."

The study is published in the journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems.