If you want to squirm out of something -- be it a meeting or even a date -- how are you likely to do it?
E-mail? Instant Messenger? Or the phone?
If researchers at Cornell University are to be believed then most people would pick up the phone to lie.
According to their study, people are more likely to lie over the phone than any other form of communication, like e-mail or a face to face chat or instant messenger.
These findings are part of a study by psychologist Jeff Hancock, an assistant professor of communications at Cornell, who has been exploring how and why humans lie.
Hancock and two of his graduate students set out to identify the form of communication that suits best for lying.
They asked 30 students to keep track of their social communications for seven days, noting when they lied and how the lie was transmitted and asked them to submit their reports anonymously.
Most confessed to lying about 1.6 times per day during an average of 6.11 social communications -- or about a fourth of the time.
The winner in that tally was the phone, which was used in 37 percent of the cases of deception. Face-to-face conversations had lies 27 percent of the time and instant messages came at 21 percent.
E-mail turned out to be a model of integrity, accounting for only 14 percent of the lies.
Hancock says the results are not surprising as it is easier to lie over the telephone because the other person cannot see your expression or know where you are. And most importantly, the conversation is unlikely to be recorded.
E-mail, by contrast, leaves a trail.
Another study by Hancock shows that older people also lie often and they do it on the phone too -- but they lie less frequenly than college students.
Other studies support Hancock's findings.
Psychologist Robert Feldman of the University of Massachusetts conducted one study in which 60 percent of the participants lied, usually two or three times, during a ten-minute conversation. What they didn't know was that their lies were being captured by a hidden video camera.
That study also showed that there is no difference between men and women in the frequency of lying but they do differ in the subject matter.
'Women were more likely to lie to make the person they were talking to feel good, while men lied most often to make themselves look better,' Feldman told ABC News.
Feldman also found that good liars tend to be more popular because they have mastered certain social skills that is necessary to make them successful liars.
In all though, this kind of lying is not such a bad thing, says Hancock. Especially small white lies that don't really hurt anyone.
'Lies aren't all bad. A lot of the time they are benign, and a lot of the time they are beneficial to someone else if not ourselves,' Hancock said on ABC News.
