> profanity and dishonesty. These two forms of norm-violating behavior

This implies that honesty is the "norm". I disagree. IMO social etiquette dictates a tremendous amount of "everyday dishonesty" "white micro-lies", and even just not engaging in those (i.e. not "being actively honest", but already just "not being actively dishonest") breaks social norms in a noticeable way.

Completely agree. Working in a corporate environment, people tend to shy away from any type of negativity or conflict, at all. Being blunt and direct is viewed negatively. I have been told by mentors that I'm too direct and to the point as a critique, which is something I didn't know was even possible.

It's incredible. But I have had to train myself to add "fluff" and language to "soften" what I am trying to communicate.

Did you see this as a failing on your part - you just didn't notice how the majority of the humans around you operate - or a failing on the part of those other humans?

I see it as a failure on my part, certainly not everyone else. That would be unreasonable. My personal preferred mode of communication is direct and to the point, but I guess most people are not like that.

> I have had to train myself to add "fluff"

You could have quit and became a waiter. You made the choice to add fluff.

> ... a linguistic analysis of real-life social interactions on Facebook ...

How can they tell if people are being dishonest on Facebook?

> The honesty of the status updates written by the participants was assessed following the approach introduced by Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, and Richards (2003) using LIWC. Their analyses showed that liars use fewer first-person pronouns (e.g., I, me), fewer third-person pronouns (e.g., she, their), fewer exclusive words (e.g., but, exclude), more motion verbs (e.g., arrive, go), and more negative words (e.g., worried, fearful; Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, & Richards, 2003). The explanation was that dishonest people subconsciously try to (1) dissociate themselves from the lie and therefore refrain from referring to themselves, (2) prefer concrete over abstract language when referring to others (using someone’s name instead of “he” or “she”), (3) are likely to feel discomfort by lying and therefore express more negative feelings, and (4) require more mental resources to obscure the lie and therefore end up using less cognitively demanding language, which is characterized by a lower frequency of exclusive words and a higher frequency of motion verbs. Equation and usage rates in this study are summarized in Table 2.

> Newman et al. (2003) achieved up to 67% accuracy when detecting lies, which was significantly higher than the 52% near-chance accuracy achieved by human judges. Their approach has been successfully applied to behavioral data (Slatcher et al., 2007) and to Facebook status updates (Feldman, Chao, Farh, & Bardi, 2015). Other studies have since found support for these LIWC dimensions as being indicative of lying and dishonesty (Bond & Lee, 2005; Hancock, Curry, Goorha, & Woodworth, 2007; see meta-analyses by DePaulo et al., 2003 and Hauch, Masip, Blandón-Gitlin, & Sporer, 2012).

So it's all purely from linguistic analysis of the status updates. Seems like a stretch to me but I wouldn't doubt the overall result is true.

Thank you for finding the details of the methodology. I find this unconvincing. 67% accuracy, while better than a coin flip, is still pretty low. 1/3rd of their data points on the relationship between dishonesty and profanity on Facebook are wrong by their own admission.

yeah, agreed. I would have thought it would be on the recipient/observer to report if they thought it was a a truthy or falsey statement, but the snippet above does not say that.

Even if the researchers fact check Facebook posts and found them to be untrue, that still wouldn't conclusively point to dishonesty because the message poster might believe in the falsehood. It's not a lie if you believe it.

> real-life social interactions on Facebook

oxymoron