A study from Brigham Young University (USA) has analyzed what happens when someone lies in a digital message, whether in a WhatsApp conversation, on social networks or in an SMS . And they have discovered that a liar can be recognized because he takes longer to respond, he edits more while he writes – erasing and rewriting – and his messages are shorter than usual.
" Digital conversations are a terrain that encourages deception, because people can disguise and make their messages seem credible," says Tom Meservy, professor of information systems and co-author of the study published in the journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems . According to the researcher, while in a face-to-face context, people can accurately detect lies 54% of the time, this percentage drops in digital communication by not being able to hear the voice of the interlocutor or see the expression on their face or gestures from your hands.
In their experiment, Meservy and his colleagues worked with more than a hundred university students who had conversations with a computer that asked them dozens of questions . When asked to lie in half of their answers, the scientists found that it took 10% longer to write the false answers , and that the false answers were edited many more times. With this knowledge, Meservy predicts, conversation systems capable of detecting lies in real time could be created.
