Speed-daters and their ilk beware. Humans are compulsive liars when meeting each other, especially if they don't know each other at first. Furthermore, contrary to possible intuition both men and women are no strangers to the falsehood spreading, seemingly lying fairly comparably in frequency. The difference is men lie more about how amazing they are, what they've done and so on whereas women do it to make other people feel better, bless them. It may be true that a woman has never answered "Does my bum look big in this?" with the killer phrase "Yes".

And how do we know this? Well, from Feldman et al.'s study "Self-Presentation and Verbal Deception: Do Self-Presenters Lie More?" amongst other sources, such as MTV reality shows no doubt."

Feldman and the team recruited volunteers for an experiment about studying interactions between people meeting each other. They were divided up randomly such that there were set numbers of pairs of men, women and mixed-gender couples. They were then sent into a room to have a 10 minute discussion in order to get to know each other and the results were taped. The only added complication was in some of the couples the presenters were told it would be nice if they could present themselves in a likable manner, some were told to do it to try and appear vaguely competent, and the rest were just left to get on with it.

Job done, they left the room and were informed by the researchers about the real purpose of the study - investigating deception. According to livescience.com, they were asked whether or not they had told any lies (or rather, said anything that was "not entirely accurate" was the slightly less judgmental wording apparently) during their 10 minute chat and they all claimed no, they had told the truth without exception.

Do we believe them? Of course not. They were then asked to review the taped evidence of their conversation and identify any incidences of lie-telling on their part, and what the truth would have actually been. Doing this revealed that 60% of them realised they had actually inadvertently told a lie or two (the other 40% of course may at this point have been lying about not telling a lie). If we believe the potential liars' statistics then the 60% of less-than-gospel-truth-tellers told an impressive average of 2.92 lies within their 10 minute session - one every 3.4 minutes or so. 1.75 lies per 10 minutes is the average result if you count the claimed truth-tellers.

These lies according to the livescience report actually surprised the liar themselves, although the Poorhouse finds it kind of hard to believe that the person who falsely claimed they were a star of a rock band didn't have a slight awareness that a separation from reality was occurring between brain and mouth.

A few number-crunchingy bits and pieces: All three groups - those who were told to appear likable, competent or not told anything at all - told lies. Those who were aiming for likable or competent did tell significantly more than the others. Some might suggest this is because by virtue of being given that mission there was something of an implicit license to lie given by the researchers. They reckon not though, saying "it seems unlikely based on postexperimental debriefing, in which participants indicated no differential perception that lying was sanctioned according to condition".

The highest number of lies told was 12. Lies about feelings were the most common, followed by lies about achievements, facts, plans and explanations in that order. Outright lies were more common than mere exaggerations or subtle falsehoods, and, as previously mentioned, men tell more lies about themselves than women do especially when trying to appear competent.

Reference: Feldman, R. S., Forrest, J. A., & Happ, B. R. (2002). Self-presentation and verbal deception: Do self-presenters lie more? Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 24, 163-170.