People who reply to questions quickly are viewed as more sincere, a recent study found. When people delay an answer by a few seconds, others feel that a person isn’t truthful.

Hesitation with an answer makes you appear insincere

According to a recent study by the American Psychological Association, when people delay answering a question by a few seconds, others feel that the reply may be untruthful as compared to an immediate response.

The longer one hesitates, the less credible he appears.

Researchers performed 14 experiments that involved over 7 thousand participants. In the experiment, people were asked to view a video, listen to an audio or read an account of someone replying a question, and rate the sincerity of the response.

Questions could be about innocent subjects like whether someone liked a cake made by a friend or about more serious matters like stealing money.

Scenarios of responses differed by the time it took the person to respond, from 0 to a 10-second delay. The longer was the delay with the reaction, the less sincere it was rated, irrespective of the matter in question.

However, there were some variances.

• Social appropriateness of a negative reaction gave a leeway for some delay with a response: For instance, it’s not viewed as polite to say that one didn’t like a cake made by a friend, so delays with a reply weren’t seen as insincere in this case.
• If the question was perceived as difficult to remember an answer (for instance, whether someone did something 10 years ago), delay in responses was only slightly influencing people’s perception of its truthfulness.

Researchers point out that people have evolved to constantly evaluate each other on sincerity of answers and obviously are wired to see delayed responses as less earnest.

People who tend to think before answering also should bear in mind that this habit may be viewed negatively by some observers. Even a delay by a couple of seconds may be viewed as a slow lie.

Even when participants were specifically asked NOT to take in consideration the delay with an answer, there was still some bias towards seeking snappy answers as more genuine. In other words, the evaluation of speedy responses as sincere is possibly hard-wired and people don’t even realize how much they are influenced by that.

However, sometimes there are other reasons why people don’t answer as quick as possible. For instance, when you communicate with a non-native speaker, they take longer to understand the question and find appropriate words to use in response.

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