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

Interpreting WhatsApp messages can save you some unpleasantness.

It seems that we lie more than we thought we would, and you don't have to be a compulsive liar to do it. According to Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deceptionpeople lie between 10 and 200 times a day, because we only tell parts of a lie.Because we only tell parts of the truth that are considered socially acceptable or phrases that people want to hear.

Why are we like that? Why are we so trigger-happy when it comes to telling someone a milonga? The truth is that many factors come into play to explain why we lie so often.

We lie between 10 and 200 times a day.

Robert Feldman, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, explains in his book The liar in your lifethat We lie between two and three times in a first 10-minute conversation with a new acquaintance.The cause? Lies are an automatic defense mechanism that is activated when someone feels their self-esteem threatened.

How do we know if we are being lied to via WhatsApp?

In the article 'The Pinocchio Effect' we talked about the thermographya technique that detects body temperature, and that can be useful to reveal that we are lying. We might think that you can catch a liar before you catch a cripple, but according to researchers at Brigham Young University in the United States, human beings are very bad lie detectors. are very bad lie detectors.. In a face-to-face interaction, we only realize that someone else is deceiving us between 54% and 56% of the time. (and we can observe the non-verbal messages, tone of voice, hand movements, gestures or gaze of the person with whom we are conversing).

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

Experiment: how to detect when we are being lied to via WhatsApp?

The experiment consisted in that the participants, university students, not only had to quickly answer dozens of random questions asked by their computer, but they also had to lie in at least half of the answers that were presented. "Digital conversations are a breeding ground for deception because people can disguise and make their messages seem believable," explains Tom Meservyprofessor of Information Systems and author of the study reported in the journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems. 

Fake responses are written "more slowly."

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