Lies and Deception in Online Dating

Do you lie or should I say exaggerate about yourself on your dating profile?

What about the profiles that you browse through?

How can you identify lies and deception in those dating profiles?

People lie to attract more suitors and present themselves as best they can. We all want to put out best “selves” out there.

Fact: Most people lie about something on their dating profile.

As I mentioned on a previous blog post; The Top 3 Online Dating Lies On Women’s Dating Profiles, one study found 81% of people lie about something on their dating profile.

Typically people lie about their be height, age, income, or weight.

What about the section where you write about yourself?

How can you identify online dating lies and deception in someone’s dating profile?

Lies and Deception Study

One study investigated whether lies and deception in online dating profiles were connected with changes in the way the daters wrote about themselves in the free-text portion of their dating profile.

The study, “What Lies Beneath: The Linguistic Traces of Deception in Online Dating Profiles”, wanted to answer the question “Do deceptions result in changes in the way daters write the textual portion of the profile?” and whether these changes are detectable by computerized linguistic analyses.

The text of dating profiles was analyzed using “Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count ”.

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a text analysis software that “calculates the degree to which people use different categories of words across a wide array of texts, including emails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech.“

The free text descriptions on sample dating profiles were converted to a text file and loaded into the LIWC tool for analysis. Word count, word usage, word frequencies, etc. were examined. The LIWC tool takes every word and assigns it to one or several of its 76 word categories.

One of these categories is “First-person singular pronouns/self-references.” This category is used to analyze deception.

Lies and Deception Study Results

The study found the more online daters lied in their profiles, the more they distanced themselves psychologically from these lies and deception by using fewer self-references such as the words “I”, “me”, “my”, and “mine” for example.

I looked on some dating profiles and sure enough within second found these in some dating profiles of men:

“Like to fish, hunt, mudding, just about anything for a rush. Trying to start a company. Taste in music is varied.”

“Fun, ambitious, smart. Love to try new things. Love the outdoors….”

“Funny, some what sane, loyal, hardworking, and hard headed.”

“Very hard worker, very creative handy type. Romantic and treat a lady proper, alot of of old school good ol days habbits, fun like to stay in with dinner and a movie or go out to a fine restaurant and a rock show..”

And it’s not just men, women are guilty of deception too:

“Mother of 7 year old daughter….have an Open Heart, am Fearless, Loyal, Genuine, an Early Morning Riser, Live with Passion and Gratitude, am Present, Focused, Driven…..”

“Witty, ambitious, love challenges, talkative at times but very much reserved….”

“Adventerous and out going but content with just a movie once in a while…”

Note that these actual examples had misspelled words in them.

Conclusion

If you believe the study, if someone doesn’t reference themselves with words like “I”, “me”, “my” or “mine” in their dating profile they may be lying about something.

People distance themselves from their lies by using fewer self-references.

Keep this in mind when browsing potential partners.

Also, be sure to double check your own profile to make sure you are referencing yourself.