| Lying is an ubiquitous phenomenon in our daily life,which has gradually spreaded on the internet on the ground that internet can be anonymous and virtual.A growing number of investigators have begun to pay attention to the frequently occurred deception online.On the one hand,comparing with lying behavior offline,some researchers have tried to understand the nature of online lying behavior through discovering the difference between them on aspects like behavioral and psychological characteristics.On the other hand,some researchers have continuously explored the effective methods to identify lies online.Although there are a variety of cues to identify lies,including physical cues,linguistic and nonverbal cues,lies online can only be identified through linguistic cues for lacking the dynamic visual information.Previous studies have showed that linguistic style cues obtained through computer-based text analysis can be effectively used to detect lies,but the predecessors have only discussed the linguistic style of lies offline and not considered the linguistic style of lies online.By analysing the texts collected in the laboratory experiment and the network,this paper will not only reveal the difference in linguistic style between lies online and offline but also predict individuals' lying behavior online with the linguistic cues obtained from experiment.There are three experiments in the present study.In experiment 1,four experimental groups of participants were required to state their true and false opinion and explain their reasons toward topics offered in various ways,including speaking,writing,typing and sending e-mails.Results showed that when the subjects gave opinions on the same topic and their implicit attitudes were consistent with explicit attitude,there exposed more linguistic style cues of lies by email(online)than that by speaking and writing(offline),which means that the difference of linguistic style between truths and lies online is bigger than that offline.Therefore,in this case the lies online were easier to be detected in terms of using linguistic cues.In experiment 2,the effective linguistic style cues of lies online were first obtained by analyzing the corpus collected in experiment and then were used to predict individuals' real lying behavior online.Results indicated that people are more likely to tell truths about the sports and political topics while more likely to tell lies about entertainment topics on the internet.In addition,the abstract level(abstract vs.concrete)of the topics was found to have an effect on the lies detection.And this effect was relevant to the theme of the topic and the way people choose to lie.In summary,current findings suggested that the linguistic style and the prediction accuracy oflies online were significantly different from the lies offline.And there existed obvious difference in lying tendency of people to lie on various hot topics on the internet.The results revealed more of the nature about lying behavior online and provided empirical evidence for the development of the tools or softwares to detect lies online in the future. |
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