Online dating websites have revolutionised the search for love, opening up the once geographically limited dating pool to millions of potential partners around the world.
The only real downside is that people aren’t always totally honest in their profiles. A few centimetres of height added here, a little creative license about their love of mountain-bike riding there.
But new research by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US has revealed the top tell-tale signs of a dating profile with fudged information.
Researchers compared the actual height, weight and age of 78 online daters to their profile information and photos, and applied linguistic analysis to their written self-descriptions.
The top indicators of people who fibbed in their profiles were:
- They were less likely to use the first person ‘I’. "Liars do this because they want to distance themselves from their deceptive statements," study spokesperson Catalina Toma explains.
- Liars are more likely to write “not sad” instead of happy, or “not boring” instead of “exciting”, a less definitive answer which to the writer feels less like a lie.
- Fabricators tended to write shorter self-descriptions - a safety net, Toma explains, against saying too much and potentially getting caught out in a lie. “The less they write, the fewer untrue things they may have to remember and support later."
The study found weight was the most commonly lied about element of a profile; with women typically subtracting 3-4 kilos from their actual weight, and men about 800 grams.
Half lied about their height, and nearly 20 percent changed their age.
The findings are published in the February issue of the Journal of Communication.
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