Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature

The following report is intended to provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political “disinformation,” a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online, including “fake news,” rumors, deliberately factually incorrect information, inadvertently factually incorrect information, politically slanted information, and “hyperpartisan” news. The review of the literature is provided in six separate sections, each of which can be read individually but that cumulatively are intended to provide an overview of what is known — and unknown — about the relationship between social media, political polarization, and disinformation. The report concludes by identifying key gaps in our understanding of these phenomena and the data that are needed to address them

Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature

The following report is intended to provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political “disinformation,” a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online, including “fake news,” rumors, deliberately factually incorrect information, inadvertently factually incorrect information, politically slanted information, and “hyperpartisan” news. The review of the literature is provided in six separate sections, each of which can be read individually but that cumulatively are intended to provide an overview of what is known — and unknown — about the relationship between social media, political polarization, and disinformation. The report concludes by identifying key gaps in our understanding of these phenomena and the data that are needed to address them

Clean Evidence on Face-to-Face: Why Experimental Economics is of Interest to Regional Economists

The notion of face-to-face contacts has recently become very popular in regional economics and in economic geography. This is the most obvious way to explain why firms still locate in proximity to others after the "death of distance", i.e., the shrinking costs for transportation, especially transportation of messages' pure information content. While this is intuitive, controlled laboratory experiments provide much more direct and reliable evidence on the importance of face-to-face contacts. They tackle the question what personal contacts are good for, and in which cases their effects are negligible. To the best of my knowledge, regional economists and geographers are not aware of this new and developing string of literature; it is the purpose of this paper to survey and to organize the relevant experimental research with a special focus on its importance for regional economics. However, the paper might also serve to alert more experimentalists to the importance of their work for current regional science, of which they seem not to be aware either.Cooperation, death of distance, face-to-face, localized spillovers, trust

Spotting lies and reading minds: development of mentalizing and deception in autistic and non-autistic individuals

Deception is ever-present in day-to-day life. One cognitive process underlying deception, which has been observed to evolve throughout development, is mentalizing i.e. the ability to attribute mental-states to others. Autistic individuals have been found to struggle with mentalizing even in adulthood, so it is possible that they show difficulties in detecting deception as well. The main aims of this PhD were to investigate how mentalizing and deception develop in autistic and non-autistic individuals from pre-adolescence to early adulthood, and to investigate other factors that may affect deception judgement, specifically intergroup bias. In my first study, I collected deception stimuli for two novel deception detection tasks, and investigated if mentalizing ability and autistic traits in a non-autistic sample were related to how successful one is at deceiving. I found that, contrary to expectations, deception production success did not correlate with either mentalizing or autistic traits. For my second study, I tested 11-30 years old autistic and non-autistic participants, using a well-established detection paradigm as well as two novel deception detection tasks, and found that autistic individuals were weaker at detecting deception than non-autistic individuals. While both mentalizing and deception detection abilities improved with age in non-autistic individuals, neither were affected by age in autistic individuals. Furthermore, deception detection was found to predict peer-victimization, and through peer-victimization effect psychological distress. For my final study, I investigated neurotype-based intergroup bias in the context of deception and found that, instead of better deception detection for the in-group (vs out-group) that was expected, both autistic and non-autistic adults were better at detecting deception from other autistic adults. I discuss the theoretical implications of these finding in terms of our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of deception, the implications this has for autistic individuals’ quality of life, and future avenues for deception and autism research

Using text mining algorithm to detect gender deception based on Malaysian chat room lingo / Dianne L. M. Cheong and Nur Atiqah Sia Abdullah @ Sia Sze Yieng

E-mail can be a fantasy playground for identity experimentations where players take on an imaginary persona and interact with each other in the virtual world. Therefore. gender deception is difficult. risky and it can be abandoned at will. Inference can be made both from writing style and from clues hidden in the posting data. A text-mining algorithm was designed to detect gender deception based on gender-preferential features at the word or clause level of Malaysian e-mail users. Based on this algorithm. a prototype in Visual Basic is developed It was tested with /6 documents; each consists of 5 e-mails exchanges of respective individuals. The tests shown the prototype have 8/.3% of accuracy level. This is consistent with a human reader of the documents. This prototype can be a tool to assist interested parties such as the Criminology and Forensic Department. e-mail users and virtual communities to successfully identify gender deception

Cross cultural verbal cues to deception: truth and lies in first and second language forensic interview contexts

Introduction: The verbal deception literature is largely based upon North American and Western European monolingual English speaker interactions. This paper extends this literature by comparing the verbal behaviors of 88 south Asian bilinguals, conversing in either first (Hindi) or second (English) languages, and 48 British monolinguals conversing in English. Methods: All participated in a live event following which they were interviewed having been incentivized to be either deceptive or truthful. Event details, complications, verifiable sources, and plausibility ratings were analyzed as a function of veracity, language and culture. Results: Main effects revealed cross cultural similarities in both first and second language interviews whereby all liar’s verbal responses were impoverished and rated as less plausible than truthtellers. However, a series of cross-cultural interactions emerged whereby bi-lingual South Asian truthtellers and liars interviewed in first and second languages exhibited varying patterns of verbal behaviors, differences that have the potential to trigger erroneous assessments in practice. Discussion: Despite limitations, including concerns centered on the reductionary nature of deception research, our results highlight that while cultural context is important, impoverished, simple verbal accounts should trigger a ‘red flag’ for further attention irrespective of culture or interview language, since the cognitive load typically associated with formulating a deceptive account apparently emerges in a broadly similar manner

Essays on trust and online peer-to-peer markets

The internet has led to the rapid emergence of new organizational forms such as the sharing economy, crowdfunding and crowdlending and those based on the blockchain. Using a variety of methods, this dissertation empirically explores trust and legitimacy in these new markets as they relate to investor decision making

Essays on the Rationality of Online Romance Scammers

The rapid development of the internet has served an essential role in providing communication platforms for people to choose to have personal interactions. One manifestation is using social media platforms and dating services to establish social relationships. The use of online platforms has also provided unscrupulous individuals with malicious intent the ability to target vulnerable victims using bogus romantic intent to obtain money from them. This type of newly evolved cybercrime is called an online romance scamming. To date, online romance scams have spread to every part of the world (i.e., mainly in the United States, China, Canada, Australia, and the UK) and caused considerable financial and emotional damage to victims. Prior research on online romance fraudsters provides a preliminary understanding of the operational features (stages and persuasive techniques) and their modus operandi. However, the objectivity and relevance of the victimization data in explaining offenders\u27 behaviors may render those studies may represent significant drawbacks. To overcome the limitations, it is important to use actual offender data to generate meaningful analyses of romance fraudsters\u27 behaviors. Consequently, this dissertation aims to use experimental data similar to that applied in my previous work (Wang et al., 2021), combined with existing criminological and communication theories, to promote a better understanding of romance fraudsters\u27 behaviors in the online world. This dissertation begins with a scoping review of the current online romance scam literature, intending to use a scientific strategy to address the existing scholarly gap in this field of research. Derived from rational choice theory, the criminal events perspective, interpersonal deception theory, and neutralization theory, the second and third paper uses an experimental approach to assess the influence of rewards on romance fraudsters\u27 behaviors. The three papers\u27 results demonstrate the rationality of online romance fraudsters when facing rewards. Moreover, such rationality can be explicitly seen from their uses of different linguistic cues. Finally, the outcomes provided in the current project also provide policymakers the information about the rationality and modus operandi of fraudsters which can be used to identify the behavioral patterns at an early phase to prevent significant harm to the victim

Interpersonal Dimensions of Information Security

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social WorkKevin F SteinmetzThis dissertation is a qualitative examination of three dimensions related to the phenomenon of social engineering. The first analysis examines the affective experience of engaging in social engineering perpetration. The results of this analysis detail the range and intensity of emotions experienced by social engineers through the course of a social engineering attempt, as well as the way in which the affective experience is mediated through interactions with targets and understandings of self. The second analysis examines how social engineers maintain deceptions across a social engineering attempt. This analysis found that social engineers employ two distinct forms of deception, bluff and stealth, and elucidates how social and technological factors are utilized by social engineers to maintain both these types of deception. The last analysis turns to the targets of social engineering, and examines how these targets engage in deception detection, which may prevent social engineering attempts from being successful. The results of this analysis find that deception detection is characterized as the target being able to detect anomalies in communications and interactions with social engineer. The results explicate the perceptual and cognitive aspects of deception detection, as well as highlight the role of knowledgeable entities, rather than individuals alone, in the accomplishment of deception detection