Cultural determinants of media choice for deception

In today’s business environment, deception is commonplace (Blumberg, 1989 and Ruane et al., 1994). Historically, individuals were limited in their media options, however recent technological advances have given individuals more ways in which to communicate and deceive. The use of these new media change the communication dynamic substantially. Previous studies have found that deception detection differs across media, as media vary in their ability to transmit cues, convey emotion and reversibility, among others. Researchers are beginning to understand the dynamics between media characteristics, individual characteristics and media choice in a deceptive communication context.Not only is deception commonplace in today’s multicultural business environment, communication participants can come from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Taking this into account, the current study seeks to use media synchrony theory to derive a model of media choice based on an individual’s espoused national culture. In this study a scenario-based media choice task was given to subjects in the United States and China, and the results indicate that espoused national culture does influence media choice for deception. Specifically, individuals who scored highly on collectivism preferred to lie using text-based media, individuals who scored high on power distance preferred to lie using audio media and individuals who scored high on masculinity preferred to lie using visual media. Implications for research and practitioners are discussed.

► Media synchrony theory for relationships culture and media choice for deception.
► Experiment where subjects asked to lie in a hypothetical work scenario.
► Data from US and China, analyzed using Fisher’s Linear Discriminate Classification.
► Results support hypotheses: culture influences media choice for deception.
► Implications for researchers are discussed.