Individual Differences in Strategic Deception

Abstract

While text-based deception in computer mediated communication has been studied, e.g., Zhou (2005) and Duran et al. (2010), there has been less focus on the differentiation of strategies for deception, especially those which may manifest in modern communication, such as found in social media. In this paper, we extend our previous work on the evaluation of linguistic indicators to strategic deception (Appling et al., 2015), by evaluating the relationship between personality and deceptive strategy use and the utilization of linguistic features for inferring both (personality and deception). We find that even with a relatively small corpus, there is evidence that personality is related to particular deception strategies, though in short social media communications, these personality traits are difficult to infer using standard linguistic measures (e.g., LIWC). We also describe the corpus we collected from an experiment in which subjects engaged in deception through a social media platform.