Speech has often been the focus when trying to expose a liar, but new Swedish research shows that writing can be just as important in providing clues.
Research on lying in psychology has long focused on things like word choice, body language, and pulse. In spoken language, researchers have tried to find markers of lies such as repetitions, gestures, and pauses.
Kajsa Gullberg is a general linguistics researcher and hopes her new dissertation can provide insights into humans’ complex language skills. Her research shows that the truthfulness of what one writes can affect the writing process itself.
More concretely, it’s about identifying patterns in how long the writing process takes, how many edits are made, and how long and frequent the pauses are.
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In psycholinguistics, which Gullberg’s research belongs to, the path from thought to speech or writing is central for understanding language ability.
– Research that investigates linguistic markers is important, but it can be complemented with more knowledge about the writing process in real time. And my study suggests that the writing process can change when someone lies, says Kajsa Gullberg.
More Pauses
The results show that if you write a long lie, you take more pauses than when you write a long true story. If you take a long time to write a lie, you take fewer pauses than if you take a long time to write the truth, and the text is edited less when lying regardless of length or writing time.
– I was surprised that people don’t edit their text as much. It may be that when we lie, we plan more before we write, especially if we take longer to write our story. If we write a long lie, we pause more because we think and construct the lie before putting it down, so there’s less need to edit afterwards, says Kajsa Gullberg.
In a follow-up study where participants had to write the same true and false stories several times, the results showed fewer edits when repeating the truth, while the number of edits for lies remained the same or even increased for repeated lies.
This is explained by the fact that it’s easier to retell something truthfully as you only have to reconstruct the sequence of events that you remember, and it gets even easier on further repetitions. When lying, you have to remember both the real sequence of events and how you lied about it to be consistent—which makes it harder, requires more control, and therefore takes longer.
The study also showed that spoken lies had fewer “uncertain” pauses like “uh” and higher numbers of filled pauses if the lie was lengthy. However, on repetition, differences between lie and truth decreased.
– A lie is more energy-consuming and requires control, which can be reflected in how we pause, says Kajsa Gullberg. Hesitation can be perceived as insecurity, so perhaps it feels better to keep talking when lying, she continues.
Hard to Expose a Liar
Gullberg also notes that it is often very difficult to determine whether a person is lying, even for those trained to observe certain markers in speech.
– But knowledge about what writing processes look like can still provide another tool in forensic contexts to identify if something deviates from the norm in language production. Overall, my dissertation indicates that the writing process is a promising area for further exploration when it comes to lies, says Kajsa Gullberg.