Digital Deception

Assigment 7, Option 1: What affects deception detection?

Detecting online deception is not an easy task, for many reasons. Detecting deception in any medium is difficult, but there are certain properties and elements of CMC that affect deception detection in this medium more than in others. Some of these elements are the lack of nonverbal cues, suspicion, and motivation.

Much of the research on deception detection has found that most cues are unreliable for determining deception, but the most reliable ones are nonverbal cues. This includes cues such as the pitch of the speaker’s voice and the amount of body movements/fidgeting. When people are trained to look at these cues, they are (slightly) better at accurately detecting deception (Ekman). Over CMC, however, these cues are not present. Primarily, the cues that people use over CMC are verbal cues (although there is an idea of a different set of nonverbal cues being present, such as length of pauses, and message length, but these haven’t yet been thoroughly studied). One would hypothesize that because there are less of the reliable nonverbal cues present in CMC, someone trying to detect deception would be less accurate in CMC, as they have fewer cues from which to base their decision (Hancock).

Another factor that influences deception detection is suspicion. People are generally not suspicious, and are often victims of the truth-bias. Especially in normal, every-day situations, we are very willing to believe the stories of the people we encounter. CMC, however, is somewhat of a different environment. We can still relate with well-known people like our friends and family, but there is also potential to interact with anyone in the world, in relatively new situations like chatrooms or forums. Being in these unusual circumstances can lead to increased suspicion. Another thing which contributes to suspicion is awareness of potential deception, either by being warned (in a laboratory experiment) or by having knowledge of previous deception (through a news broadcast on online predators). This kind of suspicion can help reduce the truth bias, and leads to somewhat better accuracy of deception detection (George).

Finally, motivation can also influence deception detection, especially in CMC. Motivation has a large influence on a liar’s attitude, because they are more concerned with being successful, and this motivation can lead to two different outcomes. First is that high motivation causes the liar to become too focused on his lie, and the liar ends up “leaking” more nonverbal cues due to the cognitive load of the lie, which leads to increased detection. This is often seen in FTF situations, where the liar doesn’t have the time to compensate for the cognitive strain of telling the lie. In CMC situations, however, we have seen that high motivation can actually cause decreased detection, because the liar is less likely to be given away by nonverbal cues (as they are not present in CMC), and the liar also has more time and resources to allot to making his lie believable (Hancock). Therefore, it has been shown that high motivation can actually make it much harder to detect deception in CMC.

posted by Kate Fenner @ 6:46 PM