Lying words

Can you tell if someone’s lying from the words they use?

Scientifically, you can.

A few years ago, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin analysed court transcripts from people who’d been convicted of perjury (lying in court). The experiment was genius, because it was able to use accurately recorded speech of people who’d been found by a jury of their peers to be liars.

This is what it found:

  • Liars avoid using personal pronouns and identifiers (I, we, me, my, mine)
  • Liars are more likely to use the passive voice (“the book was bought” rather than “I bought the book”)
  • Liars circle around topics, rather than address them directly (“this will be subject to proper investigation by Sue Gray” rather than, “No I didn’t”)

This doesn’t mean that all passively-voiced language is deceitful. However, it does suggest that passive language is more likely to be lying than direct language.

Lying language is generally something we all sense. It’s the stuff that feels evasive – or sometimes it’s language that’s so boring, we zone out of it.

Why does this happen?

Personality, state of mind and the words we use are inextricably linked. In another linguistic experiment, researchers took the texts of famous poets, anonymised them – and had an algorithm predict which writers went on to commit suicide. The prediction rates were remarkably accurate, because our language gives away a lot about who we are and how we’re thinking.

Don’t want to sound like a liar?

So there are two options if you don’t want to sound like a liar:

  1. Don’t lie (and personally, we’d appreciate this in our politicians)
  2. Don’t adopt overly formal, depersonalised language in writing because you think it sounds “official” and “proper” – because you could end up sounding like a liar, even if you’re not

If you’re a non-liar who’d like help, you know where we are.

And if you’re interested, we recommend this book:

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