A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Pathological Liars

Language is a vehicle for telling the truth and for lies. While linguistic profiles have been used to analyze the language used when telling lies, the linguistic profile of pathological liars has yet to be examined. The purpose of our study was to examine the linguistic profile of pathological liars, specifically from entries made in blogs and forums. We used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software to analyze the narratives of 22 self-reported pathological liars and compared those narratives to normative blog data. We found that pathological liars used more affective processes, negative emotion, risk, and family words. Additionally, pathological liars’ narratives contained fewer words, were less analytic, contained less clout, consisted of less tone, and were more authentic. Lastly, pathological liars tended to use more first-person singular pronouns. Implications for research and practice are discussed.