Cues to Deception in Online Chinese Groups

Advancing our knowledge about cues to deception is crucial to successful deception detection. A lengthy list of cues to deception has been identified via a myriad of deception studies. Nonetheless, we identified two major limitations of existing cues to deception: the lack of cues in computer-mediated communication and in non-Western group communication. In this research, we aim to make some contributions to addressing this line of inquiry. We conducted an empirical study on cues to deception using a large real-world online Chinese community. Through hypotheses testing, we observed a number of interesting findings. For example, we found that deceivers tended to communicate less and showed low complexity and high diversity in their messages. These findings provide significant implications to deception research and the broad online communication community.