How can I know if I am being lied to by WhatsApp?

It seems that we lie more than we thought, and it does not take a compulsive liar to do it. According to Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception, people we usually lie between 10 and 200 times a day, because we only speak parts of the truth that are considered socially acceptable or phrases that people want to hear.

Why are we like this? Why do we have such an easy trigger when it comes to telling someone a milonga? The truth is that many factors come into play when explaining why we lie so often.

We lie between 10 and 200 times a day

Robert Feldman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, explains in his book The liar in your life, what we lie two to three times in a first 10 minute conversation with a new acquaintance. The cause? Lies are an automatic defense mechanism that kicks in when someone feels their self-esteem threatened.

How to know if they lie to us on WhatsApp?

In the article 'the Pinocchio Effect'we were talking about the

thermography, a technique that detects body temperature, and that can be useful to reveal that we are lying. We might think that a liar is caught sooner than a lame person, but according to researchers at Brigham Young University in the United States, human beings we are very bad lie detectors. In a face-to-face interaction, we only realize that another is cheating on us between 54% and 56% of the time (And that we can observe the non-verbal messages, the tone of his voice, the movement of the hands, the gestures or the look of the person with whom we are talking).

Although when speaking on WhatsApp the chances of catching a liar decrease, the same study affirms that it is possible to recognize a liar by several indicators: the liar on WhatsApp he takes longer to respond, he edits more as he writes (deleting and rewriting) and his messages are shorter than usual. From now on you can take it into account, but be careful, it is not good that you fall into the paranoia of thinking that everyone wants to deceive you.

Experiment: how to detect when they lie to us on WhatsApp?

The experiment consisted in that the participants, university students, not only had to respond quickly to dozens of random questions that their computer asked them; they also had to lie in at least half of the responses that were submitted. "Digital conversations are a terrain that encourages deception because people can disguise and make their messages seem credible," he explains. Tom meservy, professor of Information Systems and author of the study collected by the journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems.

False answers are written "more slowly"

In addition, Meservi comments: “It was found that it takes 10% more time to write responses when are false, since they are edited many more times and, almost always, are shorter than habitual".