According to a new study from Brigham Young University, you should probably be suspicious of people who take their time to text you back.
The study, titled Digital Deception, found that when people lie in digital messages – texting, social media or instant messaging – they take longer to respond, make more edits and write shorter responses than usual. So if you’re texting your friend back and forth and they suddenly take a long pause before replying, you should be a little suspicious of what they have to say.
“Digital conversations are a fertile ground for deception because people can easily conceal their identity and their messages often appear credible,” says Professor of Information Systems, Tom Meservy, of the Brigham Young University, Utah.
“Unfortunately, humans are terrible at detecting deception. We’re creating methods to correct that.”
Apparently, humans can only detect lies about 54 per cent of the time and it’s even harder to detect a liar through texting, as you can’t gauge their voice or facial expression.
Having said that we wouldn’t get too worked up if the missus hasn’t texted you back in the past five minutes. The researchers said, we shouldn’t automatically assume someone is lying if they take longer to respond, but the study does provide some general patterns.
