The new research says that men consider themselves twice better at lying then women and getting away with these lies. Researchers from the University of Portsmouth find people who are good liars are good at communication, in general. That’s how they tend to lie more accurately than others. These people can confidently tell lies in face-to-face conversations instead of text messages and on social media. In fact, texting and social media are not preferred choices to lie for these people.
The complete study findings are published in the journal “PLOS ONE” (2019) and available online.
Click here to read the complete study findings.
Dr. Brianna Verigin from the University of Portsmouth is the first author and lead researcher of this experiment. Dr. Verigin says that this study has found a major link that connects lying expertise as per gender. And as per results, men are twice more likely to consider them as better lies than women.
Previous research on lying, in general, showed that people tell 1-2 lies daily. However, it is not 100% accurate. It’s not that everyone lies every day. It’s just that a small number of habitual liars are responsible for most of the reported lies.
The prolific liars mostly rely on how well they can deal with words so that they can put their lies into these truths. Mostly they hide these lies within apparently simpler, clearer and normal everyday stories. This way it becomes nearly impossible for others to detect a lie by distinguishing it from the truth.
This study is based on 194 people quiz, half of which were men and the other half were women. The average age of all these participants was 39 years. This quiz included questions about how good they are at deceiving other people; how many lies they tell in one day; what type of lies they tell; what lies they would tell and whether or not these lies are face to face or not.
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Dr. Brianna Verigin said that every time these studies reveal that people are not good at catching lies than they think they are. In fact, most people only have a 50-50 chance of finding whether or not a person is lying to us.
She further adds that she wanted to focus more on who is good at lying and to understand how do people lie and to whom they tell these lies.
The study finds one of the most crucial strategies of liars, which is that they tell all these plausible lies alongside truth. Also, if someone thinks he is better at lying, he tends to tell more lies.
It is not possible to detect lies because expert liars make sure to tell a believable story with apparently truthful information. This way it gets harder to find any spot to catch a lie.
Among the 194 participants of this study, the most common types of lies were white lies, exaggerating things, concealing information, hiding lies in truth and making up false stories. Also, the expert lies chose to lie face to face and not over text message or social media.
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Most of these lies are told to family, colleagues or friends. But employers and other authoritative figures were not much likely to be lied to.
The study found no connection between educational status and lying. Dr. Verigin hopes more detailed research would help to unveil lying patterns.