I don’t! Ever.
Four out of five men on match.com lies about their height.
And I’m not just talking about adding an inch or two. I’ve seen guys advertised at 5’10 who stand three inches shorter than my 5’9 self.
I once posted that people routinely lie about their commute – claiming a commuting time that might be achievable at 3:00 on a Sunday morning, but not during the rigors of actual rush hour. But then other posters said that in their experience, people did the opposite – namely, make their commute out to be much worse than it actually was!
Long and the short of it is, people lie about their commute times.
High maintenance like the vast majority of chicks on the planet?
Faking an orgasm is easy because most people actually don’t seem to give a damn whether their partners actually came.
People will lie about anything, and often for no real reason. There’s nothing to gain by lying and they do it anyway. I seem to notice people lying about what they eat a lot. Your special snack that you’ve been looking forward to all day is gone, yet no one will admit to having consumed it.
One of my aunts used to get her daughter’s hair permed and then tell people the little girl’s hair was naturally curly. I still can’t figure out what the point of that lie was.
It may be that it’s largely people who know beforehand that they’re good at IQ tests who voluntarily have their IQ measured, too. In that case you’d expect higher scores than average.
Also, I remember when studying psychometric testing in college that as well as measuring say introversion/extroversion or neurosis/psychosis, they would have a batch of questions specifically designed to identify lying, so candidates would come out with a ‘Lie’ score which could be taken into account at the end. I can’t remember the questions to test lying, but I think they tended to include implausibly virtuous characteristics which people would ‘own up’ to having.
I think height and weight are the usual for most people. Add an inch or two to the former, round down the latter.
“My IQ” = the highest score I’ve ever gotten on anything that claimed to be an I.Q. test, regardless of what credentials or lack thereof it had.
We also all learned to read before kindergarten, and when we realize that isn’t THAT unusual to be able to read a few sight words and recite a favorite book at four start to confess that it was actually at the age of two that we first finished War and Peace.
Doper women have a bigger than average problem buying lingere…
One thing I notice online, including here at SDMB: Any time a woman posts a picture of herself, in whatever context, a parade of guys start posting that she’s incredibly gorgeous, she’s the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen, they are drooling all over their keyboard, etc. This seems to happen no matter how unexceptional/plain the woman actually is. Different strokes for different folks and all, but the over-the-top praise that every woman seems to garner verges on parody. I don’t know whether people are genuinely trying to give a stranger a self-esteem boost, or they’re all just shameless flirts.
And some of the health-related threads can read like a bizarro reflection of the outlandish IQ claims-- posters falling over themselves to be the most obese or suffer from the most mental illnesses.
Hahaha! Not quite. You just may not have noticed, but trust me, it does happen that a woman posts her picture and no one says a damn thing. Better than people saying, “Damn, girl, you’re ugly!” but still fairly obvious what they mean.
How about someone posting her picture and saying she’s ugly, when she damn well knows she isn’t?
From archaeological studies of modern day garbage dumps, people lie a LOT about how much alcohol they drink and, most often, whether they drink alcohol at all.
Didn’t you know, Rigamarole, that women aren’t supposed to enjoy sex and that most women lie about enjoying it to make men feel better? :rolleyes: Yes, some people lie about being multiorgasmic, but not all of us do. Plus, I’m willing to wager that a great many of the women who are unable to achieve orgasm are uncomfortable with some aspect of their body to the point where it affects their ability to enjoy sex in general. There’s also the possibility (which is high) that a lot of these women are not properly aroused when having sexual contact or that they are too sensitive “down there” during the act to allow themselves to orgasm.
It depends on whether you’re complaining or boasting. Some people have to beat you at everything. Their problems are bigger, their virtues more pure than yours. I’ve actually had fun with one person who joined in a bitch session about commuting. He purported to commute an hour and forty-five minutes each way. When he did this the rest of us switched to bragging how quickly we got to work and he immediately lowered his commute time to 20 minutes. He did this with a straight face, seemingly unaware of the contradictions.
90.2% of statistics are just made up on the spot anyway.
I used to have a part-time job where I phoned people who were applying for life insurance to ask them for their detailed medical history information, to provide to the underwriters assesing them for insurance (questions included thing like doctors seen recently, any current health conditions, all past health conditions, medications, tests performed, family medical history, drinking, smoking, high risk sports/activities, driving record, international travel, etc, etc, etc). Quite a detailed questionnaire - it took about 15 to 30 minutes to complete for most people (even if you had absolutely no medical problems ever, it took about 10 minutes to read the questionnaire to them and have them answer “no” to each question, including a long list of specific medical conditions they had to listen to and then confirm they’d never had them).
I think most people were fairly honest about major health conditions, especially since most of them also had to have their doctor fill out a form so they knew that if they didn’t mention something their doctor probably would and then their omission/lie would be noticed.
I know the insurance company always took the numbers the applicants gave for amount of alcohol consumed/number of cigarettes used/amount of drugs used with a grain of salt, as they assumed people would downplay the numbers.
One funny thing I noticed though, I worked at that company for a little over a year. Three or four shifts per week, and about four to eight surveys completed per shift. So say I took medical histories from about 1,000 people in total. In all that time I only had two people admit they ever had a sexually transmitted disease (IIRC, they both had herpes).
Now, maybe the population of people who were applying at this insurance company has a lower incidence of getting STDs (Canadian, usually middle class to upper class, usually age 40 to 70). But still, I find it impossible that only 2 out of at least 1,000 people ever had any STD.
Height, weight, age, IQ, shoe size (?!?!?!), penis length, income, etc., etc.
I’ve been known to lie about my shoe size - I’ve told people I was a 9 when I’m actually more like a 7.5. Not sure why - I guess if someone is bitching about their big feet I want to be able to empathize? Absurd.
I don’t lie about my IQ, but I agree that the IQ thread is HILARIOUS!!! Really, if everyone on here were that smart, there would be way less “Look what I just picked out of my nose!” threads.
But I did ace the ASVAB! I swear!
Then again, I did tank the SAT’s. I would have to throw a football really, really well for my score to not matter.
I think most people tend to lie about their religiousness. I tend to think that most people are more comfortable saying “I believe.” than admitting they might not.
I suspect that any studies about church attendance that rely on self-reporting have to be taken with a grain of salt.
This reminded me: At my job, we sometimes have to ask customers for proof of income. You’d be astonished how many times the conversation goes something like this:
“What did you say your yearly income was, sir?”
“$100,000.”
“Just a reminder, we will require you to send in paystubs and/or tax records to prove that amount.”
“Oh… well, I can only prove $60,000.”
Then, when the documents finally come in the mail, they prove something more like $35,000. I guess people figure that if they’re lying anyway, they may as well lie big.
Are these people applying for loans or something? Because lying about your income in such circumstances seems really, really stupid! Not only because eventually you’ll have to prove your income and look like a shmoe if you said you make $100,000 and actually only make $35,000, but assume you didn’t have to prove it and were actually approved for a mortgage based on a $100,000 income -with a $35,000 income you’d defalt after only a couple of payments?!?!
I think people lie about shaving their genitals. From everything I’ve read here, every single person has shaved chicken parts all the time. I’ve mentioned my skepticism of this in the past, and there was an outcry from all the shavers, but I still don’t buy it. Maybe everyone under 25 shaves every day, but I don’t believe every Doper is bald as a grape. And then I realize that I’m thinking about other people’s genitals a wee bit too much. 
One of these days, I’m going to get a group of friends together, and we’re going to attend services at every church in town, and count the people attending. Actually, now that I think about it, that sounds like a great Internet-based project. We could take counts in every church in America!