Gender deception in asynchronous online communication : A path analysis

The increasing social reliance on computer-mediated communication has resulted in the rise of deceptive communication. Gender is a salient feature of identity that can be easily disguised online, and yet the phenomenon of gender deception has not been fully investigated. This study adopts a multifactorial analysis to examine motivation, self-efficacy and gender of a deceiver in relation to self-efficacy and gender of the detector as a contribution to understanding online gender deception. An asynchronous online game was developed to simulate scenarios in which males were incentivized to speak like females, and females were incentivized to speak like males. Using path analysis, we analyzed cognitive factors of gender deception, to support our hypotheses that an actor's actual gender can affect the motivation to deceive; males had higher self-efficacy beliefs in gender deception, and females had a higher success rate in detecting such deception. Our research suggests that the gender of the message recipient could be a significant factor in uncovering gender deception