Texting and the Language of Everyday Deception

ABSTRACT

Two experiments were conducted to examine the production and detection of common, everyday deception. Experiment 1 was a naturalistic study in which participants provided their most recent truthful and deceptive (both sent and received) text messages. Participants in Experiment 2 were asked to generate text messages that were either deceptive or truthful. Messages in both experiments were analyzed with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program and presented to other participants for their judgments of truthfulness. LIWC analyses yielded both similarities (e.g., more negations in deceptive texts) and differences (e.g., more first-person pronouns in deceptive texts) with past deception research. In contrast to prior deception research, participants in both experiments were able to significantly differentiate between deceptive and nondeceptive messages, and some of the LIWC variables that differentiated deceptive from nondeceptive texts were significantly related to judgments of truthfulness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although we were able to control for relationship differences, it is possible that there were other differences between deceptive and nondeceptive texts that we did not assess (e.g., being part of a conversational thread).

2. These LIWC composite variables are proprietary, and hence it is not possible to provide examples of the words used in their computation.

3. Significant effects for the power variable occurred for the clout and analytic categories. There were lower levels of clout when addressing a higher power recipient (M = 45.52) than a lower power recipient (M = 52.08), F(1, 312.05) = 4.24, p = .04, and analytic scores were higher when responding to the higher power recipient (M = 14.61) than when responding to the lower power recipient (M = 10.16), F(1, 312.533) = 5.18, p = .023.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation [BCS-1224553 and BCS-1917631] awarded to the first author. The second experiment was conducted as part of the second author’s master’s thesis under the direction of the first author.