It has been known forever, but now science has confirmed it.
Men lie about the size of their penis and their height, according to a new study.
Researchers in Denmark found the average man exaggerates the length of their penis by around a fifth.
They also add around 2cm to their height, a lie many women who use dating apps will be familiar with.
When self-reporting, men exaggerated the size of their penis by more than 20 percent, the study found. They would also slightly exaggerate their height (file photo)
While the average penis is longer now than in previous years, researchers found that many men are lying to an exorbitant degree.
In their survey of 224 men, 26 said their penis was more than one foot long. One brave man even said his penis was more than a half-mile.
They also slightly fib about their height, adding a few centimeters.
Researchers, who published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, went into the study with the aim of proving the age-old suspicion that men lie about their physical prowess.
They gathered data from 224 Danish men via an online survey. They then compared the average of this study population to the average measurements in Denmark.
If every member of the study answered honestly, then the average height, weight and penis size in their population would be the same as national figures.
But, when the answers were averaged, they found that many men added a little extra to their measurements.
More than two dozen men said their penis was more than 34cm long — 13in — the size of the longest penis ever recorded.
In one case, a man said his penis was 9,000cm.
These men had to be removed from the study sample because their blatant falsehoods would ruin the dataset.
Researchers also removed men who spent less than ten minutes or more than four hours taking the survey.
In these cases, researchers say the amount of time it took the men to put the answer together causes reason to doubt their validity.
The final dataset included 191 men.
Taken at face value, the results suggest the average man has a penis that was 18.02cm, or 7.1inches, long.
This is 21 percent longer than the Danish average of 14.88cm, or 5.85 inches.
Men also lied about their height, though to a much smaller extent. The average Danish man is 180.4cm, while the average from the study dataset was 180.4cm.
While the researchers consider this difference to be statistically significant, in both cases the measurements convert to 5’11.
The participants were also likely to overrepresent their athletic prowess. When answering how athletic they were on a scale from one-to-ten, a majority answered a score over five — above the average many of them are truly at.
Interestingly, men told the truth about how much they weighed.
‘The finding that participants do not seem to have over-reported their weight but likely exaggerated their height slightly also implies that they sought to present themselves as more physically fit,’ researchers wrote.
They note that this makes it so researchers and doctors alike cannot trust men to accurately report this information, and it will instead need to be professionally measured.
‘Our results suggest that private data related to bodily cues of masculinity can only be reliably collected in the lab, where conditions can be fully controlled,’ researchers concluded.
‘Given our findings, scientific studies with self-report data concerning penis size should be interpreted with great caution.’
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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk