Liar, Liar: How You Say It Reveals Falsehoods
By simply scrutinizing the language used in recounting a story, researchers say their computer was able to detect liars two-thirds of the time, according to wire reports.
In findings reported at last week's annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, researchers with the University of Texas at Austin said there are three significant linguistic characteristics that should be a tip-off to a tall tale.
The first tip-off is the usage of the words "I" or "me" in telling the story.
Second, details are typically missing, and stories include only a few broad facts. Finally, an element of guilt will often cause fictional tales to be tainted with negative emotions such as anger or anxiety.
After instructing a group of individuals to tell stories that were either true or fabricated, the researchers used a special computer designed to pick out those word patterns in detecting the deceptions.
While human judges were only able to identify the liars 52 percent of the time, the computer program based on the linguistic theory was correct up to 67 percent of the time.
HealthScout News Service