It's official: women are better liars

[Tamprio]

It's official: women are better liars

When it comes to telling the truth, a woman liar may be harder to spot than a man, new research reveals. Women's way with words can give them the edge over tongue-tied men at concealing falsehoods.

Scientists at Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh have been counting the pauses between words and discovered that men are almost twice as likely as women to hesitate mid-sentence. Normally a liar can be spotted by an increase in the number of pauses in their conversation.

Robin Lickley, a lecturer at Queen Margaret's department of speech and language sciences, said: "Females tend to be better speakers - they are more fluent at a younger age, and pick up language earlier than male children - so from the beginning they get more practice. And that seems to continue in later life. When it comes to lying, if you are having to create something, if you are having to lie, then you would want to pause longer."

Which leaves men at a disadvantage, as on average they pause more than three times every 100 words in conversation, while women do so only once every 50 words.
Lickley, who is due to publish a paper on his work this summer, said scientists have not found out why men are so tongue-tied.

"It is a matter of debate, whether it is biological or social," he said.
"Stuttering is known to be much more prevalent in the male population than the female, but that may be biological."

However, counting the pauses in conversation is not yet set to replace the polygraph as a foolproof lie detector test.

"A good liar would avoid pausing, would avoid any clues which would suggest they are lying.
The phrases "um" and "uh" help to break up the sentences, and keep the listener interested while the speaker searches for a new thought. Lickley said: "People tend to think of these things as sloppy - whereas they're perfectly normal.

"It is amazing how quickly we speak, and we have to do a lot of planning as we go along, and you do have to pause.

"It is just the fact that we don't like to leave silence when we are pausing, so we need to fill it with something. 'Um' and 'uh' are easy things to say and they use neutral sounds that don't take much effort to produce."