Website credibility and deceiver credibility: Expanding Prominence-Interpretation Theory

Deception is a common part of everyday discourse, and while much is known about deception and traditional face-to-face communication, relatively little is known about deception and its detection when the communication is computer-mediated. A recent meta-analysis (Bond & DePaulo, 2008) showed that the largest determinant of deception detection success in traditional non-mediated communication was the perceived credibility of the sender. Does this conclusion also hold for computer-mediated communication and deception detection? Using Prominence-Interpretation Theory (PIT; Fogg, 2003) and Interpersonal Deception Theory (IDT; Buller & Burgoon, 1996), we investigated the relationships among media, credibility and its antecedents, and deception detection. We expanded PIT using key concepts from IDT, resulting in what we call expanded PIT (EPIT). We created a model of EPIT and derived seven propositions from it. We argue that EPIT is a useful approach to investigating deception detection in a computer-mediated communication context and that it also has potential as a more general purpose theory.