Paris - People who tell lies are likelier to do so in a telephone call rather than an email, a psychologist says.
Researcher Jeff Hancock of Cornell University, New York state, asked 30 students to keep a truthful diary of their communications for a week, New Scientist reports.
The volunteers were asked to note the number of email exchanges or telephone conversations that lasted more than 10 minutes, as well as instant messages and face-to-face conversations, and to confess to how many lies they had told.
Lies were told in 14 percent of emails, 21 percent of instant messages, 27 percent of face-to-face contact - and a whopping 37 percent of telephone calls.
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The findings are a surprise, because emailers would normally be considered to be the most persistent liars, given the detachment of the Internet.
Hancock suggests that two factors come into play when people tell a whopper - whether the communication is instant, and whether they are being recorded.
They may be discouraged from telling lies in an email, because this message is on the record and the sender can be held to account.
But he found many of his students told lies spontaneously in face-to-face conversation because they had been caught wrongfooted.
If, for instance, someone asked them "do you like my new haircut?" and the true answer was that it looked awful, they would tell a lie to cover what they really thought.
The study, reported in next Saturday's issue of New Scientist, is to be presented by Hancock at a conference in Vienna on April on interactions between computers and humans.
He believes the findings will be of use for corporations. The telephone might be the best medium for sales employees who are encouraged to stretch the truth, but emails would be better for workers where honesty is a priority.
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