Computer-Aided Support of the Detection of Deception (original) (raw)

2004, Group Decision and Negotiation

Collaborative distributed work is founded on principles of trust and good will. Yet, like all forms of human interaction, distributed interactions are as vulnerable (if not more so) as face-to-face communication to vested interests, hidden agendas, malicious and fraudulent messages, misrepresentations, concealment of adverse information, equivocations, and other forms of deception. Understanding how deception is perpetrated and can be detected when using computer-mediated communication and collaboration tools is a most timely topic, in light of the increasing ubiquity of social computing. Toward such understanding, we have assembled special issues on "Computer-Aided Support of the Detection of Deception" that bring together the expertise and research traditions of scholars from such fields as management information systems, communication, psychology, and criminal justice and run the gamut from theoretical précis to laboratory and field experiments to application development and testing. Papers received in response to the call for these special issues underwent three blind review cycles and reviews by a minimum of four reviewers. We are therefore confident that the resultant compilations offer highly valuable insights into the world of deception in computer-mediated environments and potential means of assisting detection with the aid of computers. In the preceding issue, we had five papers on the detection of deception. The first paper by Carlson, George, Burgoon, Adkins and White, entitled "Deception in Computer-Mediated Communication," seeks to combine theories of interpersonal communication with theories of media use, such as channel expansion theory, to arrive at a set of empirically testable propositions regarding the enactment and detection of deception in computermediated communication. The paper integrates a broad range of literature on deception and electronic communication from which the resultant integrated model is derived. The second paper by Marett and George, entitled "Deception in the Case of One Sender and Multiple Receivers," offers a unique perspective on deception in group settings. It seeks to extend prior literature, most of which has examined the case of a single deceiver and single receiver, by presenting initial thoughts on deceptive communication when a deceiver has multiple receivers. This innovative paper considers the numerous complications and changes in strategy that are likely to arise when deceivers must juggle more than one audience. The third paper, by Frank, Feeley, Paolantonio and Servoss, entitled "Individual and Small Group Accuracy in Judging Truthful and Deceptive Communication," serves as an excellent complement to the Marett and George paper in that it tests experimentally how deception detection in groups compares to deception detection by individuals. Using a jury