Want To Work Out If Someone Is Lying? Time Their Texts: Liars Take Longer To Reply Because They're Making Up Stories

• People who are lying also make more edits and send shorter messages

• Humans struggle to detect lies in digital messages because they cannot see the writer's facial expression or hear their tone of voice

• The findings could lead to the development of instant chat technology that could detect lying in real-time.

The study also found when people lie in digital messages - texts, social media, email, and instant messages - they make more edits and write shorter responses than usual.‘Digital conversations are a fertile ground for deception because people can easily conceal their identity and their messages often appear credible,’ said Dr Tom Meservy, Brigham Young University in Utah. 

‘Unfortunately, humans are terrible at detecting deception. We’re creating methods to correct that.’According to Dr Meservy, humans can detect lies about 54 per cent of the time if they are lied to in person. 

It is even harder to tell when someone is lying through a digital message because you cannot hear a voice or see an expression.Dr Meservy and fellow BYU professor Dr Jeffrey Jenkins, along with colleagues at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the University of Arizona, set up an experimental instrument that tracked possible cues of online lying.The researchers created a computer programme that carried out online conversations with participants.More than 100 students from two universities had conversations with the computer, which asked them 30 questions each.The participants were told to lie in about half of their responses. The researchers found responses filled with lies took 10 per cent longer to create and were edited more than truthful messages.‘We are starting to identify signs given off by individuals that aren’t easily tracked by humans,’ Dr Meservy said. ‘The potential is that chat-based systems could be created to track deception in real-time.’The findings appear online this week in the academic information systems journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems.Dr Meservy and Dr Jenkins, who co-authored the study, said we shouldn’t automatically assume someone is lying if they take longer to respond, but the study does provide some general patterns.The researchers are furthering this line of research by using a variety of other sensors including Microsoft’s Kinect to track human behaviour and see how it connects with deception.‘We are just at the beginning of this,’ Dr Jenkins said. ‘We need to collect a lot more data.’

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