How To Tell If A Woman Is Lying In Text Messages

There are now ways to prove when a woman is lying in a text message, new research suggests. If a woman utilizes more words in a text message or the word "I," she is most likely fibbing.

Researchers from Cornell University used an Android messaging app to gather sample texts from a large group of participants. Study participants varied in gender and student status. Published to arXiv, the study collected a total of 1,703 conversations over a span of seven days, but only 351 texts didn't contain a lie. Participants were asked if the text message had a lie in it at the time it was initially sent.

Texts that contained a lie, on average, had eight words — nine words are generally used when lying. Text messages that conveyed the truth had seven words, on average.

Women have an increase in words used per text when lying, rounding out 12.84 percent. Male liars, however, were harder for the research team to pin down because men typically use fewer words to convey their point through a text message.

"There is a pattern with women using the deceptive indicator words significantly more than men," the study reads. "This could mean that men do not have as many linguistic cues for deception as women and when using linguistics to detect deception, one should weight the indicators for women more heavily than for men."

The researchers added, "One reason why men have fewer linguistic cues is that they use, on average, less words per text."

Male study participants generally used "my" or "me" frequently when lying over text.

As text messages that contained lies were separated from those that remained truthful, the Cornell researchers used a word frequency counter. This tool was used to calculate the amount in which each word appeared within a deceitful message, as well as truthful texts. Researchers used self-oriented words, other words and noncommittal phrases to conclude this.

Self-oriented words like "I" or "I'm" appeared more frequently in deceptive messages, coming in at 39 percent for "I" and more than 34 percent for "I'm." Other words like "you" pop up 58 percent less in truthful text messages.

Student texters also use significantly more self-oriented words when lying compared to non-students.

"Pronouns are particularly interesting in deception because one actively chooses which pronouns he/she wants to use when communicating," the researchers explain in the study. "Self-oriented pronouns show ownership and responsibility while other-oriented pronouns can signal distance and lack of accountability."

Researchers also discovered that all study participants had frequently used non-committal phrases more than self-oriented words and other words. Such phrases included "try" for women and "sure" for men.

"In a future study, we would like to be able to look at more variables and uncover more trends," the study's authors wrote. "Despite this the fact that this study had a broader sample than previous studies, it was still not representative of the entire population. Certain groups were not represented equally, but the findings from this study serve as a good foundation for future work."