It's no secret that some people have a talent for telling lies, while others are hopeless at fibbing.
I would place myself firmly within the second category, with my friends and family always being able to see right through me if I try to tell even the smallest of white lies.
So what is it that makes someone a convincing liar?
According to the results of new research by Maastricht University in the Netherlands, good liars often tend to possess a specific set of charateristics.
The study was conducted by Brianna Verigin and a team who surveyed almost 200 people about their lying habits, asking them to score their lying abilities from one to 10 and confess how many lies they'd told in the last 24 hours.
Participants were also asked to share the strategies they use to tell lies and score how important they thought their method was.
The findings were later published in PLOS One and they identified three characteristics that were common among those who thought they were good at lying.
First, researchers found that those who said they were good liars "may be responsible for a disproportionate amount of lies in daily life", meaning they lie often.
Secondly, the lies they told were found to be "inconsequential" and were mostly said to colleagues and friends "via face-to-face" interactions.
The third thing good liars had in common was that they relied "highly" on "verbal strategies of deception".
As well as this, the study also revealed what the most popular lying strategies were.
More than 17 percent of people said they liked to keep their lies "clear and simple", while 13 percent preferred to be "vague about details".
Good liars also said they tried hard to embed their fibs into "truthful information" to make it hard for other people to pick out what was true from what was false.
And when it came to genders, more men than women were found to think of themselves as being talented at lying, with 62.7 percent of male participants branding themselves good liars, compared to just 27.3 percent of women.
Now, we don't recommend using this information to go out and start being dishonest to your nearest and dearest, but it's certainly interesting to see how people who have a talent for spinning lies think!
