Linguistic Cues 1 Linguistic Cues for Deception Detection in Online Mafia Forums

The detection of dishonesty in computer-mediated communication such as emails, blogs, and online forums is of utmost importance for many governmental, financial, and educational institutions. Several studies have attempted to identify linguistic cues that reliably distinguish deceivers from truth-tellers, but have typically used highly artificial experimental constraints over a very limited period of time. We designed a pilot program to extract and analyze content from a popular online game that includes deception as part of the game premise, and which provides a more robust and ecologically valid data set. While the statistical power of the initial results are limited due to small sample size, this pilot study finds that none of the linguistic features identified in past research are actually reliably useful for detecting deception in this, more realistic, computer-mediated communication data.