NEW YORK -- New findings suggest that the less qualified a person is for a particular job, the more likely they are to lie about their qualifications during the job interview, making themselves look more appealing than they really are.

"When there was a disparity between their skills and the skills the job requires, that's when they tend to lie," study author Brent Weiss of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst told Reuters Health.

Weiss and his co-author Dr. Robert Feldman obtained their findings from a series of mock interviews with 38 students who believed they were applying for a job as a high school tutor for an introductory psychology course.

Participants applied for either a simple tutoring position or one that included a research project, in which the candidates would have to collect data and perform complicated statistical calculations.

After the interviews, Weiss and Feldman informed interviewees that the job didn't exist, and they were part of a research project. Each candidate then viewed a videotape of the interview, and indicated when he or she had told a lie. "Unfortunately, we have to rely on their honesty, which is ironic," Weiss said. "But it's the best we have."

Reporting at the recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference in Los Angeles, Weiss and Feldman discovered that candidates were more likely to lie during interviews for the more demanding job.

Candidates had also filled out a 20-item checklist regarding whether they possessed certain attractive qualities--sociability, organization--as part of another research project, then completed the same questionnaire before the interview.

The authors found that the majority of students fibbed more when interviewing for the more challenging job.

But whether potential employers should be up in arms about this practice or not remains to be seen, Weiss added.

When Weiss posed as the potential employer, he said that he tended to prefer the candidates who lied during the interviews. "I actually liked those who lied the most," he said. "For the most part, they're telling me exactly what I want to hear."

Although he said he would be loath to recommend that people lie during their job interviews, he noted that those who are able to tell employers what they want to hear may also be more sensitive to others and more able to determine and respond to the needs of other people.

This ability to please others may also carry over into the workplace, rendering them good coworkers, he noted.

"I'm not convinced that lying, straight across the board, in all forms, is necessarily all bad," he said.

But he repeated that this point should not serve as an encouragement to tell people only what you think they want to hear in interviews, without consideration for truth.

If employers want to detect liars during a job interview, Weiss recommended that they first review the job description and the applicants' resumes, focus on the areas where the applicants seem to be unqualified for the job, and see how they respond to questions.

"Because then you can kind of determine whether or not they're lying to you," Weiss said. (Reuters)