According to the study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, people lie easier when they use an electronic medium compared with when they are having an eye to eye contact with a stranger.

For the study, University of Massachusetts-Amherst researchers asked 110 same-sex pairs of undergraduate students to converse with each other for 15 minutes, via e-mail, instant message or face-to-face.

The participants were later asked to go through their recorded conversations and highlight their lies.

The analysis showed that people tend to tell about 1.5 lies during each 15-minute while having a face-to-face conversation; the rate was significantly higher when they were communicating through an electronic medium.

Moreover, "the farther away they were from the person they were communicating with, either physically or psychologically, the more apt they were to lie," co- author Mattitiyahu Zimbler added, noting that the e-mailers, whose messages took the longest to get to their destination, lied the most.

The e-mailers lied about five times more than people who spoke face-to-face. The participants who communicated via instant messages lied about three times more than those talking with others in person.

“It seems likely that the asynchronicity of e-mail makes the users feel even more disconnected from the respondent in that a reply to their queries is not expected immediately, but rather is delayed until some future point in time,” the researchers said.

“Ultimately, the findings show how easy it is to lie when online, and that we are more likely to be the recipient of deceptive statements in online communication than when interacting with others face-to-face,” said the other researcher Robert S. Feldman.

“Given the public attention to incidents of Internet predation, this research suggests that the deindividualization created by communicating from behind a computer screen may facilitate the process of portraying a disingenuous self,” the author concluded.

SJM/PKH