Online+Trust

 Overview
In face-to-face interactions we have a number of visual and auditory clues that, whether consciously or subconsciously, we understand to be indicators of trustworthiness. For example, people who are lying show increased rates of blinking and self-grooming actions (i.e. nervously playing with one’s hair or scratching one’s head), and their pupils have also been shown to dilate. Auditory clues include hesitation, short responses and pauses, increased speech errors, and a higher voice pitch of the liar. With the exception of video and audio recordings, online interactions do not allow us to use these cues to detect if a person is being honest. There are however, verbal clues that apply to both face-to-face interactions and text-based interactions which we can use to detect online deception. These include overgenerality, increased use of negatives, increased irrelevance, and increased exaggeration. In addition, a few auditory clues, including hesitation and short responses and pauses, have been shown to carry over into text-based lying as well. For example, a blog comment poster or person in a chat room who is lying may hesitate to respond (or in a program with real-time typing detection like AIM or facebook chat, you may see them typing and erasing a few times). This may make the recipient of the message weary, as may other verbal cues. For a (real world) example, I had a roommate freshman year who would try to steal the conversation on a lot of intellectual topics and go on and on even though it eventually became clear that he knew nothing more than the rest of us: he would overgeneralize his points, give irrelevant responses to our queries, and exaggerate his credentials and research. These were all cues to me that I couldn’t trust what he was saying, and they would have had the same affect on me if the exchange had been online, because they were all verbal and not auditory or visual clues. Blogs actually provide a superior way of detecting this kind of factual deception, because commentors can demand that the commentor in question provide a hyperlink to a reputable online source to back up their claim. For more intuitively based forms of deception detection, however, blogs pose more potential trust issues than face-to-face interaction does. People online may try to lie about their identity, or engage in conversation because of some ulterior motive (i.e. “shills” who pretend to be an excited, satisfied customer of a product that is actually their own). If there is an inconsistency or strangness of tone, or if there are obvious logical discrepancies in what they are saying, we may become suspicious, but adept online liars may not show these signs. It is important for people to be skeptical of those they meet online, especially when the interaction could potentially impact their safety (i.e. online predators), financial stability (online fraud), etc. Luckily there is strength in numbers on the internet: once a deceiver is exposed by one of the many commentors, other commentors can ignore this person, or the blog mediator can block their comments. Using the clues listed above, commentors can expose liars and thus keep the blog as trustworthy as possible.

Source: [|Detecting Online Deception and Responding to It]

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