Research has shown that 80% of dating site users misrepresent themselves. However, liars leave clues that can expose their deception, Dailymail reports.
Researchers from Cornell University have figured out what words people use to describe themselves when they try to hide their age, weight, or height. It is enough to correctly interpret these clues to expose a liar with a high probability.
An Internet user should be wary of a profile description that is too short. If a person has already decided to lie, he does not want to go into detail on a sensitive topic, trying to provide false information in passing. For example, a liar may avoid questions about his appearance, preferring to talk about his career achievements and other areas of life.
In addition, those who misrepresent their true weight or age even slightly avoid using the pronoun “I.” “Liars do this because they want to distance themselves from their deceptive statements,” explains Catalina Toma, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Liars also use descriptive or negative language. For example, instead of “funny,” they use “not sad,” and instead of “exciting,” they use “not boring.”
''People generally don't want to admit that they've lied,'' says Toma. ''But we can uncover their deception without asking direct questions, using a simple detection algorithm. The greater the deception, the less frequent the pronoun ''I'', the more negations, the shorter the description – using these indicators, we were able to correctly identify liars in 65% of cases.''
This accuracy of detection is certainly higher than that of inexperienced users. To verify this, the researchers asked several volunteers to rate how credible the descriptions of the proposed profiles were. ''As expected, people were unable to detect the deception,'' says Toma. ''They might as well have tossed a coin. They focus on the wrong things that expose the liar.''
