'Lying' texters take longer to respond

A new study has claimed that when people tell lies in digital messages - texting, social media or instant messaging -longer time is taken by them to respond, make more edits and write shorter responses than usual.

Tom Meservy, Brigham Young University professor of information systems, said that digital conversations are a fertile ground for deception because people can easily conceal their identity and their messages often appear credible.

He asserted that unfortunately, humans are terrible at detecting deception. We're creating methods to correct that.

Meservy and fellow BYU professor Jeffrey Jenkins, along with colleagues at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the University of Arizona, created a computer program that carried out online conversations with participants - similar to the experience consumers have with online customer service questions.

More than 100 students from two large universities, one in the southeastern U.S. and one in the southwestern U.S., had conversations with the computer, which asked them 30 questions each.

The participants were told to lie in about half of their responses. The researchers found responses filled with lies took 10 percent longer to create and were edited more than truthful messages.

The findings have been published online in the journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems.