The language of liars. 'Legendary,' 'famous,' or 'notorious'? Fish shapes.
Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers.
Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2024
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1011. This week, we look at language patterns that may indicate someone is lying, such as how often they say "um" and the diversity of the words they use. Then we tease out the difference between being legendary, famous, infamous, and notorious.
The "language of lying" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." A version of this story originally appeared on Psychology Today, and you can find her at valeriefridland.com.
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References for the "Linguistics of Lying" segment
Arciuli, J., Mallard, D., and Villar, G. (2010). “Um, I can tell you’re lying”: Linguistic markers of deception versus truth-telling in speech. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31(3), 397–411.
Bond, C., & DePaulo, B. M. (2006). Accuracy of deception judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 214–234.
Hauch, Valerie, Iris Blandón-Gitlin, Jaume Masip, and Siegfried L. Sporer. (2014) Are Computers Effective Lie Detectors? A Meta-Analysis of Linguistic Cues to Deception. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 19:4, 307-342.
Fuller, Biros, D. P., & Wilson, R. L. (2009). Decision support for determining veracity via linguistic-based cues. Decision Support Systems, 46(3), 695–703.
Verschuere, B., Bogaard, G., and Meijer, E. (2020). Discriminating deceptive from truthful statements using the verifiability approach: A meta-analysis. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 35, 374–384.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Grammar girl here I'm in y'on foggarty your friendly guide to the |
| 0:09.1 | English language. We talk about writing history rules and other cool stuff. Today we're gonna talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. |
| 0:14.0 | Today we're going to talk about whether you can tell people are lying by the language they use |
| 0:19.2 | and about the difference between being legendary or merely famous. |
| 0:23.7 | Despite our tendency to view public figures with skepticism, |
| 0:31.7 | some newsmakers continue to surprise us with the breadth and depth of their |
| 0:36.6 | lies. |
| 0:38.6 | Equally disturbing can be how long it takes to uncover the false tales, even when much of what the liars claim should be relatively |
| 0:46.4 | easy to check. But our tendency to believe what people say is tied to the underlying rules that guide us to be cooperative conversationalists, an important |
| 0:57.5 | part of civilized society. With most of us assuming that such cooperation includes telling the truth. |
| 1:05.0 | Unfortunately, this tendency makes us quite bad at sensing when someone's lying. |
| 1:11.0 | Research shows that humans perform only slightly better than chance, |
| 1:16.1 | a detecting deception, even with training. |
| 1:19.6 | And sometimes the news feels like a daily reminder of both our propensity to take people at their |
| 1:25.0 | word and our failure to detect signs that people are lying. |
| 1:30.3 | But the fact that we aren't able to recognize it when someone lies doesn't mean they don't leave |
| 1:35.4 | clues to their dishonesty. In that vein, researchers have been trying to determine whether liars or truth tellers have certain linguistic tells. Can |
| 1:45.8 | studying language use reveal when someone's being deceptive? Well, quite a bit of |
| 1:52.0 | psycholinguistic research has examined how a filled pauses, those |
| 1:56.4 | umms and us that pop into our speech happen when our brains are working extra hard as we're constructing sentences or searching for words. |
| 2:06.5 | And some psychological research suggests that they could also be indicators of how truthful |
| 2:12.3 | a speaker is being. |
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