An awkward pause in an otherwise fluid conversation over text message may set off warning signals in your brain for a reason, as researchers have discovered that humans can detect lies about 54 percent of the time, and a text delay may signal one, Science20 reports.
Tom Meservy, a Brigham Young University professor of information systems, co-authored the new study published in the journal Intelligent Systems on nonverbal communicarion and behavior. When it came to text messages, social media and instant messaging, catching someone in a lie, despite not being able to hear their voice or read their body language, may be easier than we think.
Researchers analyzed a number of digital messages and determined that people who make more edits, take longer to respond and write shorter responses than usual are more likely to be lying.
To test this, they created an experimental instrument, a computer program that simulated conversations with more than 100 student participants from two large universities, one in the southeast and one in the southwest. Participants were instructed to lie in about half of their responses with the computer, which asked them a total of 30 questions each. The answers with lies took participants an average of about 10 percent longer to respond to than the ones they answered truthfully.
"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 statement about the study. "Unfortunately, humans are terrible at detecting deception. We're creating methods to correct that. We are starting to identify signs given off by individuals that aren't easily tracked by humans. The potential is that chat-based systems could be created to track deception in real-time."
However, researchers cautioned that some people simply take longer to respond, and that people shouldn't automatically assume someone is lying based on their response time, though it does signal a general pattern in communication, and may help people be more cautious when it comes to issues of safety and personal security online, especially where online transactions are concerned.
