Study shows people are more likely to lie while text messaging

The University of British Columbia conducted a study recently, suggesting people are more likely to lie in text messages than they are in all other forms of communication.

This was done with a pretty ingenious role-playing game of 'stock market.'  170 students were analysed via face-to-face, audio, video and text message communications as they play the rolls of brokers selling stock or consumers out to buy the aforementioned stock.  Just before the brokers were to make their sales pitch to consumers, they were informed that the stock had lost half its value, which set the stage for the buyers to report back to researchers, determining how often they'd been lied to.

Results showed that the brokers were 95% more likely to lie in text than video, 31% more likely than face-to-face, and 18% sparred against audio communication.  Conclusion based suggestions from these findings seem to be that video's increased subconcious feeling of scrutinisation results in a much more honest communications, while text messaging (as seen via the comparisons to the other three forms of connectivity) is at the complete opposite end of this scale.  Might be unnerving; but really unsurprising.  After all, you can't have a texting-conversation without feeling that at least some of it maybe a white lie fabrications.

And on a rather interesting side-note, the study also found that people get angry more at deception via "leaner" media (texts and audio) as opposed to the more direct forms of communications.

Source: University of British Columbia