Sometimes there are battle of the sexes competitions you just don’t want to win—and this is one of them. Do men or women lie more on their online dating profiles? We wanted to find the answer to this question so we set out and asked 1,000 adults in the United States evenly split across 4 age brackets and evenly split between men and women to get an answer.
The question we asked was “Have you ever lied about any of the following on an online dating profile?” Respondents could choose from 12 different options (multiple answers were allowed) or they could choose “I have never lied on an online dating profile.”
We wanted to answer three main questions:
- Are single men and women lying on their online dating profiles?
- Are men or women lying more on their dating profiles?
- What specifically are they lying about the most and the least?
Here are those results. Keep in mind that we asked about lying specifically on their profile and not in conversation. That’s a different topic we plan to look into during our next poll.
Key Results – Men Admit to Lying More than Women on Their Dating Profiles
At the top level just looking at yes or no to lying on their dating profile, men took home the trophy that no one wants to win. According to our poll, 60.8% of men admitted to lying about at least one thing on their dating profile. Only 48.6% of women admitted to the same offense.
| Respondent | Yes | No |
|---|---|---|
| Men | 60.8% | 39.2% |
| Women | 48.6% | 51.4% |
What Men and Women are Most Likely to Lie About
While the top-line data is quite intriguing, it gets considerably more interesting when you dig deeper into what each group is lying about.
First, here are the top five things men admitted to lying about.
And here are the top five things women admitted to lying about on their dating profiles.
For both men and women, the two most lied about things were the same—age and hobbies and interests. Beyond that, the top answers begin to differ.
Here’s a look at each of the 12 categories and whether men or women admitted to lying about that topic more.
What’s pretty interesting is that men were most likely to lie about every category except for weight. Here’s a look at the raw data to see each section individually.
| Answer | Male | Female |
|---|---|---|
| Age | 25.2% | 16.8% |
| Ethnicity | 7.6% | 4.6% |
| Height | 18.8% | 10.8% |
| Kids | 8.0% | 5.0% |
| Hobbies | 22.0% | 15.0% |
| Income | 20.2% | 12.2% |
| Job | 12.4% | 8.8% |
| Lifestyle | 13.4% | 11.8% |
| Photos | 6.6% | 4.2% |
| Relationship Goals | 12.8% | 12.2% |
| Relationship Status | 12.0% | 8.6% |
| Weight | 12.8% | 13.4% |
| Never | 39.2% | 51.4% |
If you want to see more data like each category broken down by age group, we’d encourage you to take a look at our full study on lying in online dating.
Data Considerations and Future Studies
One of the most important things to remember in this study is that it is self-reported, meaning that those taking the poll are responsible for being truthful. Unfortunately, there really is no way to mitigate this other than providing no incentive to lie or be untruthful by making the poll anonymous outside of age and gender.
Additionally, there is a chance that there is something someone has lied about that was not included in the 12 options we provided. In those instances, the respondent may have been inclined to select that they’ve never lied, which might skew the data. However, we believe those situations are most likely non-existent or at worst, few and far between.
Lastly, there is a concern that people may have different definitions of what lying is. For some, exaggerating the truth is not a lie. For others, anything other than exact facts is lying. And even for some, omitting information that might be helpful to another single could be something they consider lying. We deemed these to be fairly unmitigable factors.
In the future, we’d like to expand the study to look at whether or not the rates of lying are consistent with conversations in dating and not just on their profile.