- Scientists found women are more likely to use more words when lying in texts
- An average deceitful text had an average of 8.2 words and truthful ones had 7.4
- When figures were broken down by age and sex men wrote in the same terse
- But women would use 9.2 words in the average lie and 8 in a sincere message
Women sending deceitful text messages are more likely to have used nine words compared just eight in an honest one.
Scientists at Cornell University in New York analysed a total of 1,703 conversations for their research — 351 of which contained at least one lie.
The researchers found that an average lying text contained 8.2 words, compared with 7.4 in an honest message.
Liars also appeared to avoid talking about themselves and other people, using 27 per cent fewer ‘self-oriented’ pronouns and 11 per cent fewer ‘other oriented’ pronouns.
Researchers found women used 9.2 words in the average lie but 8 words in a sincere text. They were also more prone to use the words ‘I’, ‘I’m’ and ‘try’ when fibbing
They were also nearly twice as likely to use non-committal phrases and qualifiers such as ‘some’, ‘sure’ and ‘try’.
But differences became more apparent when the data was broken down by age and sex.
Men largely wrote the same terse for all their messages, with the exception being the use of the words ‘probably’ and ‘sure’ indicate a possible fibber.
The scientists at Cornell University in New York also found that men, largely, wrote in the same terse throughout the messages
Men largely wrote the same terse for all their messages, with the exception being the use of the words ‘probably’ and ‘sure’ indicate a possible fibber
Women, however, were found to use an average of 9.2 words when lying and just eight words when being honest.
‘There is a pattern with women using the deceptive indicator word significantly more often than men,’ the researchers wrote.
‘This could mean that men do not have as many linguistic cues for deception as women and when using linguistics to detect deception one should weight the indicators for women more heavily than men.’