Cyberpsychology Behaviour and Social Networking | Publication

I supervised Catherine Friend, MSc Cyberpsychology, for her thesis research project in IADT. We published this peer review article from her work. AbstractWhere humans have been found to detect lies or deception only at the rate of chance in offline face-to-face communication (F2F), computer-mediated communication (CMC) online can elicit higher rates of trust and sharing of personal information than F2F. How do levels of trust and empathetic personality traits like perspective taking (PT) relate to deception detection in real-time CMC compared to F2F? A between groups correlational design (N = 40) demonstrated that, through a paired deceptive conversation task with confederates, levels of participant trust could predict accurate detection online but not offline. Second, participant PT abilities could not predict accurate detection in either conversation medium. Finally, this study found that conversation medium also had no effect on deception detection. This study finds support for the effects of the Truth Bias and online disinhibition in deception, and further implications in law enforcement are discussed.Read it here (paywall)Friend, C. & Fox Hamilton, N. (2016). Deception detection: The effect of trust levels and perspective taking in real time online and offline communication environments. Cyberpsychology Behaviour and Social Networking, 19(9), 532-537.