Study 2
Study 1 used computerized analyses to identify the linguistic traces left by deception
in the textual self-description portion of online dating profiles. The goal of the second
study is to determine whether human judges are able to identify deception based on
the same textual self-descriptions and whether they can capitalize on the linguistic
cues identified in Study 1.
A practical consideration in this detection task is that the textual self-descriptions
are only one part of the profile. More importantly, daters reported their textual
descriptions as generally accurate, although Study 1 showed that these self-reported
accurate texts were associated with deception in the overall profile (i.e., height,
weight, age, and photograph). In other words, these texts provide information aboutthe general honesty of the online daters who wrote them. For this reason, judges in
this study were asked to rate the trustworthiness of the online dater who wrote the
textual self-description, rather than the accuracy of the text per se. Trustworthiness in
this context is operationally defined as the extent to which daters can be relied on to
tell the truth in their profiles—an admittedly narrow and domain-specific definition.
Can perceivers accurately detect online daters’ trustworthiness based solely on how
they describe themselves in the textual self-description portion of the profile?