CREDIT: NICOLETAIONESCU / THINKSTOCK
Spotting lies in person is only possible around 55% of the time. Spotting a lie in text is nearly impossible.

As communication relies more and more on technology and the written word, it has become difficult to interpret fact from fiction. Between satirical news sites like The Onion, the lack of emotional clarity in text messages and the brevity of tweets, it can be hard to know what anyone is actually saying.

Reading important text and news critically has always been a crucial skill, emphasized in most post secondary programs as a foundation for success, but how well do we actually discern fact from fiction in text?

According to Dr. Victoria Rubin's presentation, Language of Deception: Looking at Tell-Tale Signs of Lying, we aren't that good at it. The latest figure claims that the average person can discern a lie from the truth only 54 per cent to 58 per cent of the time; odds not much better than chance.

“Lie spotting is a skill, which requires quite a bit of training, quite a bit of expertise, quite a bit of experience,” Rubin said.

While some techniques that rely on visual queues are efficient, others are not.

Part of the reason we are so bad at determining a lie when speaking with someone is that we often rely on misinformation: trying to detect a lie based on a lie.

Commonly believed indicators of lying, such as a person touching their nose, have little to no empirical evidence to back them up. Some of these techniques are purported via much of mainstream media.

In Timothy Levin's paper The Impact of Lie to Me on Viewers Actual Ability to Detect Deception, he stated, “Lie to Me [a popular television show] viewers were no better at distinguishing truths from lies, but were more likely than control participants to misidentify honest interviewees as deceptive. Watching Lie to Me decreases truth bias thereby increasing suspicion of others while at the same time reducing deception detection ability.”

Beyond the inaccuracy of certain methods, Rubin's research has also found that actively looking for visual clues is a distraction, and limits our ability to find the truth.

However, there are some proven indicators that someone is lying.

When people lie they tend not to refer to themselves. Words like “I”, “me” and “my” are almost completely omitted, while collective pronouns such as “us” and “we”, and third person pronouns such as “he”, “she” and “they” will be overwhelmingly substituted. Liars refrain from putting themselves at the centre of the story.

Word count and specificity are also good metrics for deriving truth. When a person is lying about facts, they talk less and in generalities. However, due to the brevity of the liars' responses, it will often elicit further questions, resulting in the liar saying more than someone telling the truth, but in shorter sentences. This is true both in person and in text.

For example, if someone were asking their friend where they have been, a lie may be: “I was exercising”, potentially spurring the question: “where were you exercising?” and so on. This line of questioning would create a higher overall word count than if one responded, “I was at the park doing yoga”.

This can be difficult with text messages, one of the more common forms of communication. Text messages tend to encourage short, concise responses, which is perhaps why we have such a hard time deciphering the real meaning behind a text.

According to the research of Jeff Hancock, a common form of lying within the realm of social text media is what he calls “butler lies”. These lies are characterized by “managing the entry and exit of social interactions”.

According to Hancock, such lies are fairly innocuous such as, “Anyway I have to go do homework,” when in fact the liar in question is not doing homework.

Rubin said, “In some talks I heard by Jeff Hancock, he blames the necessity to lie directly on the unrealistic expectations of being constantly reachable.”

It would seem that these butler lies are becoming the norm, but may be ultimately harmless. “I think that we are all re-negotiating the norms of politeness and social interaction,” Rubin said.

While we may tell butler lies more often than we're aware of, Rubin purports that the “digital footprint” of traceable text media inhibits us from telling grandiose lies that would have greater impact.

“Interacting ‘on record' (such as texting) may make us think of our own ‘personal legacy' perhaps more carefully as opposed to speaking ‘off record',” Rubin said.

Whether our lies are necessary and innocuous, or voluntary and detrimental it seems we all do it, and are relatively unaware of when it's being done to us.