Effects of media affordances on nonstrategic cues
As previously discussed, online dating profiles are written under conditions of
editability and asynchronicity, which allow daters a high degree of control over
what they say. How does this increased control affect the leakage of linguistic cues?
Emotional cues should be immune to the effect of these affordances because they
are nonconscious and difficult to control. Additionally, having more time to reflect
on and edit the profile should not decrease the negative emotions elicited by lying.
Consistent with this prediction, previous research has documented the leakage of
emotional linguistic cues even in asynchronous environments (Newman et al., 2003;
Zhou et al., 2004).
H1: Highly deceptive profiles will contain fewer self-references but more negations and
negative emotion words than less deceptive profiles.