Similarly, cognitive markers of deception are difficult to control. In fact, previous
studies (Newman et al., 2003; Zhou et al., 2004) have found them to emerge even
in asynchronous environments, where liars have ample opportunity to control their
messages. For this reason, cognitive indicators are expected to emerge in the textual
portion of online dating profiles.
H2: Highly deceptive profiles will contain fewer exclusive words, increased motion words, but
a lower overall word count than less deceptive profiles.
However, the asynchronicity and editability of profile construction may reduce
the cognitive burden of lying. Even though liars may be unaware of these cognitive
cues, the fact that they can take longer to write their self-descriptions or write them
at a different time than the rest of the profile may decrease cognitive load. If this is
the case, the predictive power of some of the markers of cognitive complexity should
be attenuated compared with that of emotional markers, which should be immune
to the effects of editability and asynchronicity.
H3: Emotionally related linguistic cues to deception should account for more variance in
deception scores than cognitively related linguistic cues in online dating profiles.1