Our happy hour fact to amaze your drinking buddies with.

Nicolas SarkozyThe thicker a non-native person's accent, the less willing native speakers are to believe what they say.

Researchers from the University of Chicago had Americans judge statements read by native and non-native English speakers and evaluate their truthfulness. Despite the fact that the volunteer judges knew the statements were straight from a script, they became more skeptical if the words were read by a reader with a heavy accent.

"The accent makes it harder for people to understand what the non-native speaker is saying," explained psychology professor Boaz Keysar, who worked on the study. "They mis-attribute the difficulty of understanding the speech to the truthfulness of the statements."

We have to believe the once-popular TV show "Perfect Strangers" has something to do with this phenomenon. Balki was the first heavily accented foreigner many Americans were exposed to on a regular basis, and it was fairly obvious that his stories about "Mypos" were completely made up.