麻豆传媒

2/13/12

News — MADISON -- Online daters intent on fudging their personal information have a big advantage: most people are terrible at identifying a liar. But new research is turning the tables on deceivers using their own words. 鈥淕enerally, people don鈥檛 want to admit they鈥檝e lied,鈥� says Catalina Toma, communication science professor at the University of Wisconsin鈥揗adison. 鈥淏ut we don鈥檛 have to rely on the liars to tell us about their lies. We can read their handiwork.鈥� Using personal descriptions written for Internet dating profiles, Toma and Jeffrey Hancock, communication professor at Cornell University, have identified clues as to whether the author was being deceptive. The researchers compared the actual height, weight and age of 78 online daters to their profile information and photos on four matchmaking websites. A linguistic analysis of the group鈥檚 written self-descriptions published in the February issue of the Journal of Communication revealed patterns in the liars鈥� writing. The more deceptive a dater鈥檚 profile, the less likely they were to use the first-person pronoun 鈥淚.鈥� 鈥淟iars do this because they want to distance themselves from their deceptive statements,鈥� Toma says. The liars often employed negation, a flip of the language that would restate 鈥渉appy鈥� as 鈥渘ot sad鈥� or 鈥渆xciting鈥� as 鈥渘ot boring.鈥� And the fabricators tended to write shorter self-descriptions in their profiles 鈥� a hedge, Toma expects, against weaving a more tangled web of deception. 鈥淭hey don鈥檛 want to say too much,鈥� Toma says. 鈥淟iars experience a lot of cognitive load. They have a lot to think about. They less they write, the fewer untrue things they may have to remember and support later.鈥� Liars were also careful to skirt their own deception. Daters who had lied about their age, height or weight or had included a photo the researchers found to be less than representative of reality, were likely to avoid discussing their appearance in their written descriptions, choosing instead to talk about work or life achievements. The toolkit of language clues gave the researchers a distinct advantage when they re-examined their pool of 78 online daters. 鈥淭he more deceptive the self-description, the fewer times you see 鈥業,鈥� the more negation, the fewer words total 鈥� using those indicators, we were able to correctly identify the liars about 65 percent of the time,鈥� Toma says. A success rate of nearly two-thirds is a commanding lead over the untrained eye. In a second leg of their study, Toma and Hancock asked volunteers to judge the daters鈥� trustworthiness based solely on the written self-descriptions posted on their online profiles. 鈥淲e asked them to tell us how trustworthy the person who wrote each profile was. And, as we expected, people are just bad at this,鈥� Toma says. 鈥淭hey might as well have flipped a coin ... They鈥檙e looking at the wrong things.鈥� About 80 percent of the 78 profiles in the study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, strayed from the truth on some level. 鈥淎lmost everybody lied about something, but the magnitude was often small,鈥� Toma says. Weight was the most frequent transgression, with women off by an average of 8.5 pounds and men missing by 1.5 pounds on average. Half lied about their height, and nearly 20 percent changed their age. Studying lying through online communication such as dating profiles opens a door on a medium in which the liar has more room to maneuver. 鈥淥nline dating is different. It鈥檚 not a traditional interaction,鈥� Toma says. For one, it鈥檚 asynchronous. The back-and-forth of an in-person conversation is missing, giving a liar the opportunity to respond at their leisure or not at all. And it鈥檚 editable, so the first telling of the story can come out exactly like the profile-writer would like. 鈥淵ou have all the time in the world to say whatever you want,鈥� Toma says. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e not expected to be spontaneous. You can write and rewrite as many times as you want before you post, and then in many cases return and edit yourself.鈥� Toma says the findings are not out of line with what we know about liars in face-to-face situations. 鈥淥nline daters鈥� motivations to lie are pretty much the same as traditional daters鈥�,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not like a deceptive online profile is a new beast, and that helps us apply what we can learn to all manners of communication鈥� But don鈥檛 go looking just yet for the dating site that employs Toma鈥檚 linguistic analysis as a built-in lie detector. 鈥淪omeday there may be software to tell you how likely it is that the cute person whose profile you鈥檙e looking at is lying to you, or even that someone is being deceptive in an e-mail,鈥� Toma says. 鈥淏ut that may take a while.鈥�