Guess Who? An Empirical Study of Gender Deception and Detection in Computer-Mediated Communication

The verification of an online conversation partner’s identity is a challenge due to the lack of verbal and visual cues in computer-mediated communication. People must constantly assess the identity of whomever they are communicating with based on limited interaction. This poster describes an empirical study that identifies how people attribute gender and detects gender deception in online text-based communication. Data has been collected through an interactive social media game platform and designed as a quasi-experiment. Our study confirms that the speakers’ domain knowledge, perceived trustworthiness, and self-efficacy have an impact on the success of gender deception and attribution. Perceived gender of the speaker also had an impact on the successful detection of gender deceptive messages.