Summary: The longer someone hesitates before answering a question, the less sincere their reply appears to others.
Source: APA
Research finds that even a brief pause before answering makes responses seem less sincere and less credible than immediate answers.
Across a series of controlled studies, the longer a person delayed their reply, the more likely listeners and observers were to judge that reply as insincere.
“Evaluating other people’s sincerity is a constant and important part of social life,” said lead author Ignazio Ziano, PhD, of Grenoble Ecole de Management. “Our findings show that response speed is a readily available cue people use when forming impressions of sincerity.”
The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The team ran 14 experiments involving a total of more than 7,500 participants from the United States, the United Kingdom and France. People heard short audio clips, watched videos, or read written descriptions of someone answering simple questions—for example, whether they liked a friend’s cake or whether they had stolen money from work. In each scenario the timing of the reply was varied, ranging from immediate responses to delays of up to 10 seconds. Afterward, participants rated how sincere they believed the responder to be.
Consistently across experiments, delayed answers were judged less sincere than quick answers, regardless of whether the question was trivial or serious.
Some conditions reduced this effect. If the truthful answer would be socially undesirable—such as admitting you don’t like a friend’s cake—people judged responses as sincere whether they were fast or slow. Likewise, when a slow reply could reasonably be attributed to mental effort (for example, trying to remember whether you stole something years earlier), the impact of delay on perceived sincerity was smaller.
Ziano noted that these findings have broad implications. “People constantly assess others’ sincerity, from casual workplace conversations to conflicts between partners and friends. In high-stakes settings like job interviews, court hearings or police questioning, response speed can influence judgments about honesty.”
For instance, Ziano described a hiring scenario in which two candidates are asked whether they know the programming language JavaScript. If one candidate answers immediately and the other pauses for three seconds before saying yes, observers are more likely to trust the immediate answer and favor that candidate. “Whenever a clear answer is required, even a short delay can be taken as a sign of insincerity,” he said.
The researchers also emphasized potential consequences in legal settings. Jurors or judges may misinterpret a delayed reply as evidence of deception, when in fact the pause could be caused by distraction, careful thought, or other innocent factors.
“It would be unfair to penalize a responder because a delay was misread as fabrication or suppression of the truth when the delay had a different cause,” Ziano said.
In a final experiment, telling observers explicitly to ignore the timing of responses reduced—but did not fully eliminate—the tendency to view delayed replies as less sincere or more indicative of guilt.
“Overall, our studies suggest a strong and consistent bias: fast replies are generally interpreted as more sincere, while even brief delays can be taken as signs of a ‘slow lie,’” Ziano concluded.
About this psychology research news
Source: APA
Contact: Jim Sliwa – APA
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access.
Title: “Slow lies: Response delays promote perceptions of insincerity” by Ziano, I., & Wang, D., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Abstract
Slow lies: Response delays promote perceptions of insincerity
Evaluating others’ sincerity is a common and important part of everyday social interaction. Fourteen experiments (total N = 7,565; including preregistered studies and samples from the U.S., the U.K., and France) show that how quickly someone answers is a reliable cue people use to judge sincerity. Across contexts—from trivial conversations to high-stakes situations like police interviews—slower replies were consistently judged as less sincere than faster ones. The researchers propose that observers infer slower responses result from suppression of truthful, automatic thoughts and the construction of a fabricated answer. People also apply situational reasoning: the negative effect of delay is reduced when an answer would be socially undesirable or when a delay is plausibly due to cognitive effort. Finally, instructing observers to ignore response speed can lessen, but not completely remove, its influence on sincerity judgments. These findings highlight the role of response timing in interpersonal evaluations and raise practical concerns for settings such as legal proceedings, where innocent delays might be misconstrued as deception.