People Who Lie Take Longer to Respond While Texting

Have you ever been in that awkward situation where you’re busy exchanging a flurry of

messages on one of the social media platform and suddenly you dropped a question and the conversation seems to slow down because the person on the other end is taking longer than normal to respond to your last message? There could be a number of reasons for such a thing to happen.

A new research however is suggesting we should be suspicious when such an incident occurs. Why?  The reason is because when people lie in digital messages – texting, social media or instant messaging – they take longer to respond according to a Brigham Young University study. Besides taking longer to respond, they also make more edits and write shorter responses than usual.

According to one of the researchers, digital conversations are a fertile ground for deception because people can easily conceal their identity and their messages may appear credible. In addition, humans are not very good at detecting lies and it's even harder to tell when someone is lying through a digital message because you can't hear a voice or see an expression.

With the many financial, security and personal safety implications of digital deception, the researchers set up an experimental instrument that tracked possible cues of online lying. They created a computer program that carried out online conversations with participants – similar to the experience consumers have with online customer service questions.

More than 100 students from two large universities, had conversations with the computer, which asked them 30 questions each. The participants were told to lie in about half of their responses. The researchers found responses filled with lies took 10 percent longer to create and were edited more than truthful messages.
The researchers hope to identify signs given off by people that are not easily tracked by individuals. The findings appeared online in the academic information systems journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems.


The authors of the study however warned that we shouldn't automatically assume someone is lying if they take longer to respond, but the study does provide some general patterns. The researchers are furthering this line of research by using a variety of other sensors to track human behavior and see how it connects with deception.