Men Think They Are Better Liars Than Women, Finds Study

While ‘lying’ is something no gender should be proud of, a new study finds that men tend to think they are better at getting away with lies than women are. So, yes, the next-time your male close-one misses dinner because of a ‘cant’ help it’ extra work-load he might probably be out enjoying a football match with his friends chucking down cans of cold beer. The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE revealed that expert liars also prefer to lie upfront rather than hide behind phone screens.

"We found a significant link between expertise at lying and gender. Men were more than twice as likely to consider themselves expert liars who got away with it," said study researcher Brianna Verigin from the University of Portsmouth in the UK.

For the findings, the research team surveyed 194 people—half men and half women, with an average age of 39, and were questioned on how many times they tell in a day to whom and for what reason.

"Time after time, studies have shown we are not as good at detecting lies as we think we are. At best, most of us have a 50:50 chance of getting it right when someone is pulling the wool over our eyes," Verigin said.

"We wanted to focus on those who are good at lying and try to understand how they do it and to whom," she said.

The study found one of the key strategies of liars is to tell plausible lies that stay close to the truth while withholding information. And the better someone thinks they are at lying, the more lies they’ll tell.

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.

Most people chose to lie face-to-face, then via text message, a phone call, email, and last, via social media. Most expert liars lie most often to family, friends or colleagues while employers and authority figures were least likely to be lied to.

Researchers are however yet to study on good liars’ expertise at embedding lies within truthful information and at using facts that were impossible to check.