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Cultural Determinants of Media Choice for Deception

In today's business environment, deception is commonplace. In hiring situations, successful deception by job candidates can lead to a poor fit between the candidate's abilities and the requirements of the job, and this can lead to poor performance. This study seeks to inhibit successful deception by job candidates by suggesting that managers limit communication with job applicants to the media that the applicant is least comfortable using for deception. Media vary on several dimensions, such as their ability to transmit cues and convey personal focus. The choice of which media to use to communicate a lie will depend on the characteristics of the media, as well as several other factors. Some of these factors are situational, such as the familiarity of the receiver with the sender, and some of these factors are related to the individual attempting to communicate the lie. Because different people react to lying differently, their preference for media characteristics will vary when they lie. Deception research has largely been conducted in a North American context, using North American subjects. As a result, our understanding of deception and its detection outside of North America is limited. In today's multicultural business environment, job applicants can come from a variety of cultural backgrounds, and the attitudes, beliefs, customs and norms related to deception that they exhibit may differ from those of their North American counterparts. Taking this into account, the current study seeks to predict media choice for deception based on a subject's espoused national culture. A scenario-based media choice task was given to subjects in the United States and China, aimed at determining the effect of espoused collectivism, espoused power distance, espoused uncertainty avoidance, espoused masculinity, espoused long-term orientation, espoused universalism, the severity of the lie and the familiarity of the reciever on media choice. Results indicate that espoused collectivism, espoused power distance, espoused masculinity and the severity of the lie had an impact on media choice. The findings of the current study carry implications for researchers and for managers. For researchers this study suggests that media choice and deception models developed in North America may not hold when applied to subjects who are not North American. In addition, this study contributes to a relatively understudied area of deception research: deception from the point of view of the deceiver. For managers charged with hiring candidates for positions sensitive with regard to national security, this study suggests communication media, based on the espoused national culture of the candidate, that should make successful deception more difficult. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Management Information Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2008. / June 25, 2008. / Media Choice, Media Selection, Culture, Deception, Lying / Includes bibliographical references. / Joey F. George, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lee Stepina, Outside Committee Member; David Paradice, Committee Member; Ashley Bush, Committee Member.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_182506
ContributorsFurner, Christopher P. (Christopher Paul) (authoraut), George, Joey F. (professor directing dissertation), Stepina, Lee (outside committee member), Paradice, David (committee member), Bush, Ashley (committee member), Department of Management Information Systems (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution)
PublisherFlorida State University, Florida State University
Source SetsFlorida State University
LanguageEnglish, English
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText, text
Format1 online resource, computer, application/pdf
RightsThis Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them.

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