Lie detection might bring to mind an image of a calm physcologist sitting a table with a suspect, asking trivial control questions before getting to the tough questions.  Now that image might be replaced with that of a technician simply scanning a document and applying an algorithm to at your writting style.

Based on the hypothesis that the brain needs to work harder to create lies, researchers tracked writting styles to look for changes based on the distraction of thinking up lies.  To prove out the correlation, volunteers were asked to write one paragraph about a true event and one paragraph about a ficticious event.  Metrics such as how hard you press, the height of letters, and stroke length proved to be good indicators of a false story.

“In the false writing condition, the average pressure, stroke length and height were significantly higher than in the true writing condition,” the researchers said.

“We know that people hesitate more when they lie and some companies already use this fact to see how long it takes people to tick boxes when filling in surveys online,” he said.

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