The language of lying, by Noah Zandan.
1. Liars reference themselves less when making deceptive statements. They write or talk more about others, often using the third person to distance and disassociate themselves from their life.
2. Liars tend to be more negative because, on a subconscious level, they feel guilty about lying.
3. Liars typically explain events in simple terms, since our brains struggle to build a complex lie. Judgment and evaluation are complex things for our brains to compute.
4. Even though liars keep descriptions simple, they tend to use longer and more convoluted sentence structure, inserting unnecessary words and irrelevant but factual-sounding details in order to pad the lie.
(via Brain Pickings and TED)
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