Linguistic cues predict fraudulent events in a corporate social network

Abstract

There is an increase in deception studies investigating which non-linguistic and linguistic cues best predict deception. Even though these studies have shown participants consistently use specific cues to deception when they are asked to deceive somebody in a particular situation, it is less clear how these findings translate to non-experimental settings, for instance, do these cues also apply in cases of global deception in social networks. This paper investigated whether fraudulent events can be related to linguistic cues of deception within records of a large corporate social network. Specifically, we investigated the Enron email dataset using a model of interpersonal language use. Results suggest that during times of fraud, emails were composed with higher degrees of abstractness.


Back to Table of Contents