The more deceptive a dater's profile, the less likely they were to use the first-person pronoun "I."...Cognitive load. What an expression! It suggests a new answer for the old question: "Are you shitting me?"
The liars often employed negation, a flip of the language that would restate "happy" as "not sad" or "exciting" as "not boring." And the fabricators tended to write shorter self-descriptions in their profiles....
"They don't want to say too much," Toma says. "Liars experience a lot of cognitive load. They have a lot to think about. The less they write, the fewer untrue things they may have to remember and support later."
February 14, 2012
Linguistic cues that a person is lying on his/her on-line dating profile.
Discerned by a UW communications prof Catalina Toma:
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24 comments:
I'm so much cooler online.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE6iAjEv9dQ
I remember being taught this in some psych class in high school. The idea is that by speaking in a negative, it is less constraining. For example, I am happy means a definitive thing. If I am just not sad, I could be neutral, or happy. It is a wider range of possibilities that is harder say: "ah hah, gotcha."
Same reason to have fewer facts. "The pop corn was stale when I saw the movie with Bob and Jim at last night." has more facts that can be picked apart, and opens you to more avenues to have a thread pulled and the whole thing fall apart.
"I went to a movie last night" is much harder to disprove.
And how often does our current President use the first singular pronoun?
Also, link is going to blogger.com/edu instead of where it is meant to go.
Membership rolls at online dating sites are the biggest sausage party this side of the Krakow Kielbasa Festival. Commercials for one site (match.com?) boast that 10,000 new people join each day. What they don't say is that 9,900 of them are male.
Frankly, "not boring" sounds a lot more honest than "exciting" on a dating profile, to me at least
"Are you shitting me" makes me laugh every time. I don't know if I have ever said it myself but it brings back memories of old conversations with my brothers. I haven't heard anyone use it aloud in years, though I've heard it several times lately online.
Matt hew. Bill Clinton's statements about Monica Lewinski is a classic example of that kind of obfiscation.
Cognitive load. What an expression! It suggests a new answer for the old question: "Are you shitting me?"
Heh, hopefully many will think of this while considering voting for their boyfriend Obama next time.
What about using "severely" as a modifier?
You should see my severely ripped abs.
OK, if "The more deceptive a dater's profile, the less likely they were to use the first-person pronoun 'I.'", then all it boils down to is:
dump the guy when he says, "Enough about me, let's talk about you".
Peter (not Hoh):
For me, that's a feature, not a bug.
It's called a 'cognitive load' because they are bullshitting you.
I would never shit you. You're my favorite turd.
:)
Once again, the extroverted view of vomiting your life on everyone is held up as honorable.
(And isn't there a difference between being reserved or circumspect and lying? Why assume because someone doesn't tell you everything, they're lying?)
I'm so much cooler online.
Love me some Brad Paisley.
Rather than being liars, some of us are just modest.
Rather than being liars, some of us are just modest.
Quite true. If I put an honest description of myself, it would be beyond belief. (I'll leave it up to you whether it would be good or bad.)
I'm not doing any online dating, but if I were, I wouldn't use "I" a lot, and my self description would be very short. And I wouldn't bother lying.
When we lie it just means we care..
We are just saying.
Life lottery winners don't need to lie.
..or is it the one percenters.
"Are you shitting me?"
"They asked me how I knew, Racoon-shit was blue,
Horse-shit, I said, bull-shit you've been fed,
Racoon-shit is red."
(recited to the tune of Smoke gets in your Eyes--old 50s HS "witticism.")
Ann -- supremo.
Will keep me coming back.
Like playing one hole as Tiger would keep the load of the remaining 17 off my mind.
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