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STORY TAKEN FROM WTOP.COM

UNDATED – Does that email or instant message you sent contain a lie? A new study finds emails and IMs are more likely to contain fibs than conversations.

Why? Your facial expressions and verbal cues don’t give you away.

The research out of the University of Massachussetts at Amherst is published in the October issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Researchers studied 110 pairs of college students meeting for the first time. They engaged in 15-minute conversations either face-to-face, using IM or by email.

The emails had three times as many lies as face-to-face talks.

You guessed it. People just wanted to make themselves look better, and it was a lot easier to lie to somebody you don’t know.