Signs If Someone Is Lying In An Online Dating Site

Posted on 5/31/2022by admin

Studies show we are bad lie detectors, but a few clues can help.

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Posted March 16, 2012

The research focused on online dating, an arena rife with deception from men and women alike. Using personal descriptions written for Internet dating profiles, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cornell University have identified reliable 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's written self-descriptions revealed patterns in the liars' writing.

Here are a few examples:

The more deceptive a dater's profile, the less likely they were to use the first-person pronoun 'I.' Liars do this because they want to distance themselves from their deceptive statements.

Signs If Someone Is Lying In An Online Dating Site Video

Liars often used negation, a flip of the language that would restate 'happy' as 'not sad' or 'exciting' as 'not boring.'

Liars tended to write shorter self-descriptions in their profiles—a hedge against weaving a more tangled web of deception. The less they write, the fewer untrue things they have to remember and explain later.

Daters who had lied about their age, height or weight or had included a photo the researchers found to be inaccurate, were likely to avoid discussing their appearance in their written descriptions, choosing instead to talk about work or life achievements.

Using indicators like those above allowed the researchers to correctly identify liars 65% of the time—a significantly higher percentage than what the typical person is capable of, which according to previous studies is usually well below 50%.

What research like this is leading to are programs that analyze verbiage online in a variety of scenarios to determine who is lying (or, in the case of dating sites, who is lying the most, since about 80% of participants lie to some degree).

By the way, if you're wondering what people lied about the most, it was their weight. No surprise there. According to the study, women tended to misrepresent their weight by an average of 8.5 pounds and men by around 1.5 pounds. Half of the participants also lied about their height, and nearly 20 percent changed their age.

The study was published in the February issue of the Journal of Communication.

Four clues to deciphering the language of online lying.

Posted November 15, 2011

Though internet lie detection may seem to be a daunting task, it's not an impossible one. Once you understand the language of the online liar, you may actually prefer the cues you can read on the screen rather than the cues you read on someone's face.

Communication professors Catalina Toma (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Jeffrey Hancock (Cornell University) decided to use their analytic tools to detect the language patterns shown by online liars (Tona & Hancock, in press). They conducted in-person interviews of 80 online dating service users who previously completed online profiles. Participants rated the accuracy of their own self-descriptions, a process that could be prone not so much to outright lying, but at the least, to self-deception or exaggeration. After all, we don't always want to admit the truth about ourselves to ourselves. To supplement the self-ratings, the researchers also calculated an objective deception index comparing what participants said about their physical attributes (height, weight, age) with their measured attributes. Photos presented yet another challenge. A group of undergraduates compared the online photos to photos taken in the lab to determine how accurate they were.

The deception index provided, in the words of the scientific method, the 'dependent variable.' In other words, building an index showing how far people's online profiles deviated from the reality of their true attributes, allowed the researchers to move on to figure out how to predict the extent to which online liars lie.

To tackle this prediction problem, Toma and Hancock enlisted the help of a computerized linguistic program. The program analyzed the open-ended self-descriptions that participants included in their profiles. By crunching the numbers and types of words the online daters produced, the computer found these 3 revealing cues to lying.

Wouldn't it be nice if a mouse could serve as a lie detector?

The results of the computer analyses fit a theory known as Interpersonal Deception Theory, which predicts that liars use communication strategically to accomplish their goals.

These are great clues, then, but what if you don't have a computer that can analyze what you're reading on your computer? In other words, can people detect lying in online profiles? It would be nice if we could but, unfortunately, the human mind is more easily swayed. We are subject to what deception researchers call the 'truth bias.' Most of us normally assume that other people are honest. These tendencies came out in the next phase of the study.

Looking at actual online readers, Toma and Hancock next recruited a sample of 62 undergraduates to read some of the self-descriptions the computer had already analyzed. As it turned out, the human raters were no better than chance in picking out the online deceivers. What's more, they based their judgments solely on the length of the self-descriptions. The longer the self-description, the more truthful it seemed to the raters. Other than correctly assessing length as a predictor of truthfulness, however, humans were far worse than computers at sniffing out the liars. Humans tend to use clues such as pronouns: talking about 'we' evokes more trust than talking about 'you.' These aren't as relevant as the cues that computers picked up on thatseparate truthful people from liars but they do provide evidence of a fourth clue to online lying.

1. Longer is better. An internet profile rich in self-description is likely to be more truthful. Liars may be afraid of getting caught in their own traps. The more detailed a person's story, the more likely it contains accurate self-depictions.

2. Look for consistency. When people describe themselves in one part of an online profile, they should be able to provide back-up evidence somewhere else that confirms it. Don't just read an online self-description from top to bottom. Go back and double check within the profile to make sure it all fits together. You could also, if you are seriously interested in pursuing a relationship with this person, resort to a Google search.

3. Recognize that liars avoid negative emotions. The person strying to sway you will try to avoid negative associations. The liar will want you to feel warm and fuzzy, not uncomfortable: 'It's all good.' An unrealistically positive image may be just that—unrealistic.

4. Watch out for the 'we's.' Avoid being drawn into the liar's web of deception that puts you and a stranger on a par. An unusually high number of first-person plural pronouns may signify a profile that is intended to make you feel emotionally close to the writer but not one that is particularly honest.

The truth bias may operate far more in online dating situations than in other everyday situations in life. If we like someone's photo (which, remember, is unlikely to be accurate), we're willing to suspend disbelief. However, the online world has plenty of traps set by people who do not have your best interests at heart. Learn to let your head rule your heart, and your online experiences can be far more fulfilling.

Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily updates on psychology, health, and aging and please check out my website,www.searchforfulfillment.com where you can read this week's Weekly Focus to get additional information, self-tests, and psychology-related links.

Reference:

Toma, C. & Hancock, C. (in press). What lies beneath: The linguistic traces of deception in online dating profiles. To appear in the Journal of Communication. (I wish to thank the authors for sending me a pre-publication copy of the article).

Signs If Someone Is Lying In An Online Dating Site Dating Apps

Readers may also wish to follow the landmark work of Dr. Bella DePaulo, an international authority on both lying and the single experience.