They have discovered that you can recognize a liar because it takes longer to respond, edit as you type more -borrando and reescribiendo- and their messages are shorter than usual.
"The digital conversations are a land that encourages cheating, because people can hide and make their messages appear credible," says Tom Meservy, professor of information systems and co-author of the study published in the journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems .
According to the researcher, while in a classroom context people can detect lies precisely in 54% of cases, this percentage drops in digital communication not being able to hear the caller's voice and the expression on his face or gestures of his hands.
In their experiment, Meservy and his colleagues worked with more than a hundred college students who held talks with a computer that formulated them dozens of questions. When asked to lie in the middle of their answers, scientists found that 10% took more time to write the wrong answers, and that the latter were published many more times.
With this knowledge, augurs Meservy, they could create conversation systems able to detect lies in real time.