The Language of Lying

“Sorry, my phone died.” “It’s nothing. I’m fine.” “I love you.”

We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day, and we spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect them, from medieval torture devices to polygraphs, blood-pressure and breathing monitors, voice-stress     1     and eye trackers. But although such tools have worked under certain circumstances, most can be fooled with enough preparation, and none are considered reliable enough to even be admissible in court. But, what if the problem is not with the     2    , but the underlying assumption that lying brings about physiological changes? What if we took a more direct     3    , using communication science to analyze the lies themselves?

Psychologically speaking, we lie partly to paint a better picture of ourselves, connecting our fantasies to the person we wish we were rather than the person we are. But while our brain is busy dreaming, it’s letting plenty of signals     4     by. Our     5     mind only controls about 5% of our cognitive function, including communication while the other 95% occurs beyond our awareness. According to the literature on reality monitoring, stories based on imagined experiences are qualitatively different from those based on real experiences. This suggests that creating a false story about a personal topic takes work and results in a different pattern of language use.

A technology known as linguistic text analysis has helped to     6     three such common patterns in the subconscious language of deception.

First, liars mention themselves less when making     7     statements. They write or talk more about others, often using the third person to     8     themselves from their lie, which sounds more false: “Absolutely no party took place at this house,” or “Nobody hosted a party here.”

Second, liars tend to be more     9    , because on a subconscious level, they feel guilty about lying. For example, a liar might say something like, “Sorry, my stupid phone battery died. I hate that thing.”

Third, liars tend to use longer sentence structure, inserting irrelevant but     10     sounding details in order to pad the lie. A President confronted with a scandal claimed: “I can say, categorically, that this investigation indicates that no one on the White House staff, no one in this administration presently employed was involved in this very odd incident.”