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Showing posts with label word choices and liars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label word choices and liars. Show all posts

Word choice, like body language, can reveal a liar

Lying often involves telling a story that is false, a story that the liar doesn't believe. If you analyze the text of a liar or a truth teller and look at the linguistic style you can see words and phrases that distinguish between true and false stories. Computer based text analysis programs can correctly classify liars and truth-tellers at a rate of 67% accuracy. Here is how you can look for words and phrases that liars use. Compared to truth-tellers, liars use fewer self-references such as I or me and prefer to use words like we or us. Liars are more likely to use other-references such as she or her instead of personal reverences such as, "My daughter Sara or my wife Sue". Liars use inclusive generalization such as "awhile ago" instead of "five days ago". They also use more negative emotion words like bad or awful.