What Words Do We Use to Lie?: Word Choice in Deceptive Messages
This research addresses the need for more reliable deception detection in computer-mediated communication, though it is incremental as it builds on prior work with a larger dataset.
The study tackled the problem of identifying linguistic patterns in deceptive text messages by analyzing a large and varied dataset from an Android messaging app, finding significant differences in word choice and deception frequency between genders and student statuses.
Text messaging is the most widely used form of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Previous findings have shown that linguistic factors can reliably indicate messages as deceptive. For example, users take longer and use more words to craft deceptive messages than they do truthful messages. Existing research has also examined how factors, such as student status and gender, affect rates of deception and word choice in deceptive messages. However, this research has been limited by small sample sizes and has returned contradicting findings. This paper aims to address these issues by using a dataset of text messages collected from a large and varied set of participants using an Android messaging application. The results of this paper show significant differences in word choice and frequency of deceptive messages between male and female participants, as well as between students and non-students.