Men Think They’re Better Liars
University of Portsmouth / Dec. 20, 2019

“What stood out in our study was that nearly half (40 per cent) of all lies are told by a very small number of deceivers. And these people will lie with impunity to those closest to them.

“Prolific liars rely on a great deal on being good with words, weaving their lies into truths, so it becomes hard for others to distinguish the difference, and they’re also better than most at hiding lies within apparently simple, clear stories which are harder for others to doubt.”

Dr. Verigin quizzed 194 people, half men and half women, with an average age of 39.

They were asked a series of questions including how good they were at deceiving others, how many lies they’d told in the past 24 hours, the type of lies they’d told, who to, and whether they’d done so face-to-face or via other means.

Obviously, none of the study participants was a Moon Nuker, or one would have asked the doctor “Are you a Verigin?”

The study found one of the key strategies of liars is to tell plausible lies that stay close to the truth, and to not give away much information. And the better someone thinks they are at lying, the more lies they’ll tell.

The most commonly used strategy among all those who admitted to lying, whether experts or poor liars, was to leave out certain information. But expert liars added to that an ability to weave a believable story embellished with truth, making the lies harder to spot.

In contrast, those who thought they weren’t good at lying resorted, when they did lie, to being vague.

Overall, of the 194 people, the most common types of deception, in descending order, were ‘white lies’, exaggerations, hiding information, burying lies in a torrent of truth and making up things.

The 194 Times employees then went back to their offices, saying “Hmm. ‘White lies’ — I’ll have to remember that.”