Fiona Harvey of the Financial Times reports on new software that purports to detect deception in electronic text messages. Excerpt:
Software that can detect when people are lying in their e-mails sounds a bit far-fetched, but its manufacturers declare it is true.
SAS Institute, which makes fraud-detection systems for banks and phone companies, will on Monday announce a product that can sift through e-mails and other electronic text to catch elusive nuances such as tone.
“The patterns in people’s language change when they are uncertain or lying,” says Peter Dorrington, business solutions manager at SAS. “We can compare basic patterns in words and grammatical structures versus benchmarks to detect likely lies.”
Perhaps SAS business solutions manager Peter Dorrington’s claims regarding this new software should be scanned for likely lies.