
Jeffrey T HancockStanford University | SU · Department of Communication
Jeffrey T Hancock
PhD
About
144
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2012 - July 2015
January 2004 - December 2012
Education
August 1997 - August 2002
September 1993 - May 1996
Publications
Publications (144)
The QAnon movement has been credited with spreading disinformation and fueling online radicalization in the United States and around the globe. While some research has documented publicly-visible communications and engagements with the QAnon movement, little work has examined individuals' actual exposure to QAnon content. In this paper, we investig...
One of humanity’s greatest strengths lies in our ability to collaborate to achieve more than we can alone. Just as collaboration can be an important strength, humankind’s inability to detect deception is one of our greatest weaknesses. Recently, our struggles with deception detection have been the subject of scholarly and public attention with the...
Social virtual reality (VR), by definition, focuses on people, using networked VR systems to bring avatars together. Previous studies have examined how different factors affect social interaction, in small groups such as dyads or triads. However, in a typical social VR scene there tends to be dozens of avatars, even those not directly interacting w...
Interventions to build resilience to misinformation should consider the needs of communities of color, who experience (mis)information in unique ways. We evaluated digital media literacy interventions to improve misinformation resilience among four communities of color in the United States (Black, Latino, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Native Ame...
Research on physical-world environments has shown that the spatial properties of built worlds are consequential for shaping psychological states and social behavior. However, it has been difficult to empirically test this in natural settings in the physical world. This study uses immersive virtual reality (VR) environments, which have shown to have...
Humans often display a truth-bias—the perception that others are honest independent of message veracity—but does this phenomenon extend to generative artificial intelligence (AI)? We had humans and large language models make nearly 1,000 veracity judgments across different prompts. Human detection accuracies were near chance (50%–53%) with notable...
There is growing interest in applications of virtual reality (VR) to improve the lives of older adults, but the limited research on older adults and VR largely treats older adults as a monolith, ignoring the substantial differences across 65 to 100+ year olds that may affect their experience of VR. There are also few existing studies examining the...
Most deception scholars agree that deception production and deception detection effects often display mixed results across settings. For example, some liars use more emotion than truth-tellers when discussing fake opinions on abortion, but not when communicating fake distress. Similarly, verbal and nonverbal cues are often inconsistent predictors t...
This paper examines strategies for making misinformation interventions responsive to four communities of color. Using qualitative focus groups with members of four non-profit organizations, we worked with community leaders to identify misinformation narratives, sources of exposure, and effective intervention strategies in the Asian American Pacific...
This article examines how verbal authenticity influences person perception. Our work combines human judgments and natural language processing to suggest verbal authenticity is a positive predictor of interpersonal interest (Study 1: 294 dyadic conversations), engagement with speeches (Study 2: 2,655 TED talks), entrepreneurial success (Study 3: 478...
The United States Constitution grants Americans the “right to a speedy and public trial,” with an assumption that the trial is impartial and fair. Recent data suggest a nontrivial number of cases fail to meet this standard. During interrogations, suspects can be presented with false evidence, long interrogations can undermine a suspect’s cognitive...
A small cottage industry emerging within the larger gig economy is online dating assistant (ODA) companies that allow paying clients to outsource the labor associated with online dating, including profile development, date selection and matching, and even interaction (i.e., ODAs assume their clients’ identities to exchange messages with other [unsu...
Individuals high in psychopathy are interpersonally manipulative, exhibit callous affect, and have criminal tendencies. The present study examines whether these attributes of psychopathy are correlated with linguistic patterns present in everyday online communication. Participants’ emails, SMS messages, and Facebook messages were collected and anal...
Context always matters in online deception. This study conceptualizes language-action cues as a dynamic and interactive representation of context, and explores indicators of interpersonal deception in spontaneous computer-mediated communication. An online game was designed and developed to simulate computer-mediated deception scenarios in pairwise...
A salient issue for online romantic relationships is the possibility of deception, but it is unclear how lies are communicated before daters meet. We collected mobile dating deceptions from the discovery phase, a conversation period after daters match on profiles but before a face-to-face interaction. Study 1 found that nearly two-thirds of lies we...
In studying the increasing role that opaque, algorithmically-driven systems, such as social media feeds, play in society and people's everyday lives, user folk theories are emerging as one powerful lens with which to examine the relationship between user and algorithmic system. Folk theories allow researchers to better see from users' own perspecti...
Background:
Substance use-related communication for drug use promotion and its prevention is widely prevalent on social media. Social media big data involve naturally occurring communication phenomena that are observable through social media platforms, which can be used in computational or scalable solutions to generate data-driven inferences. Des...
Words symbolically represent communicative and behavioral intent, and can provide clues to a communicator's future actions in online communication. This paper describes a sociotechnical study conducted from 2008 through 2015 to identify deceptive communicative intent within group context as manifested in language-action cues. Specifically, this stu...
While Facebook is a popular venue for sharing information about ourselves, it also allows others to share information about us, which can lead to embarrassment. This study investigates the effects of shared face-threatening information on emotional and nonverbal indicators of embarrassment using an experiment (N = 120) in which pairs of friends pos...
This study examines how explicit and implicit cues to social norms affect disclosure and privacy decisions in a Social Network Site (SNS) context. Study 1 revealed that participants' disclosure behavior adhered to explicit cues indicating disclosure frequency norms, while implicit social norm cues (i.e., surveillance primes) acted to increase overa...
BACKGROUND
We employed persuasion strategies to develop and evaluate social media- and crowdsourcing-based interventions for smoking reduction and cessation.
OBJECTIVE
We delivered various levels of informational and social support to current smokers and pilot-tested the acceptability, feasibility and persuasion effects of three antismoking interv...
Can the positivity bias, observed across various Social Network Sites (SNSs), predict the use of prosocial lies in a SNS such as Facebook? The positivity bias may be a product of politeness norms (i.e., positive face concern) that have influenced communication phenomena before these sites existed. In addition, positive face concern may also be affe...
One of the most popular ways to initiate romantic relationships today is through online dating. Typical dating systems follow one of three formats, see-and-screen (e.g., Match.com), algorithm (e.g., eHarmony.com), and blended (e.g., OkCupid.com), which differ in the amount of individual control and algorithmic involvement they offer users. Do diffe...
People in psychological distress communicate differently than those who are free from psychological pain. We examine whether this phenomenon extends to musicians in popular media by investigating the lyrics of artists in the 27 Club, a notorious group of musicians who either committed suicide or who died of nonsuicidal causes at the age of 27. As p...
BACKGROUND
Substance use–related communication for drug use promotion and its prevention is widely prevalent on social media. Social media big data involve naturally occurring communication phenomena that are observable through social media platforms, which can be used in computational or scalable solutions to generate data-driven inferences. Despi...
A culture’s social fabric is deeply dependent on how its members establish romantic bonds. What happens when the way those bonds are formed is radically changed over the course of a single generation? This is the case with the rise of online dating, which is now the second most common way for people to meet a romantic partner. Despite existing rese...
Advertorials—advertisements camouflaged as editorial material—are a pervasive advertising strategy. Presentational features of advertorials, such as a small or omitted advertisement label and useful information presented in an editorial format prior to promoting a product, are likely to give impressions to readers that the reading material is a use...
Computer-mediated deception threatens the security of online users’ private and personal information. Previous research confirms that humans are bad lie detectors, while demonstrating that certain observable linguistic features can provide crucial cues to detect deception. We designed and conducted an experiment that creates spontaneous deception s...
Online deception takes many forms, ranging from overt e-mail spam to interpersonal lies in online dating profiles. Current research has focused on the ability to understand behavioral patterns of deception (e.g., frequency of lies, language cues) in order forecast how lies differ from truths in a variety of contexts. These efforts suggest that our...
The rise of scientific fraud has drawn significant attention to research misconduct across disciplines. Documented cases of fraud provide an opportunity to examine whether scientists write differently when reporting on fraudulent research. In an analysis of over two million words, we evaluated 253 publications retracted for fraudulent data and comp...
The ubiquity of mobile devices has resulted in more opportunities to interact with more people than ever before. Given a finite capacity for interaction with others, people commonly manage their availability by limiting others' access to them. Prior work has demonstrated the importance of doing so in a relationally sensitive way and identified the...
Kim, S. J., & Hancock, J. T. (2015). Optimistic bias and Facebook use: Self-other discrepancies about potential risks and benefits of Facebook use. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. 18(4), 214-220. doi:10.1089/cyber.2014.0656.
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Despite the accumulating evidence on the...
There is a large body of evidence to suggest that child sex offenders engage in grooming to facilitate victimization. It has been speculated that this step-by-step grooming process is also used by offenders who access their underage victims online; however, little research has been done to examine whether there are unique aspects of computer-mediat...
With the recent and dramatic changes to communication patterns introduced by new information technologies it is increasingly important to understand how deception is produced in new media. In the present study we investigate deception production in text messaging, focusing on how often people lie, about what and to whom. This study uses a novel dat...
Objective
This study aims to determine whether communicating via short message service text message during surgery procedures leads to decreased intake of fentanyl for patients receiving regional anesthesia below the waist compared with a distraction condition and no intervention.Methods
Ninety-eight patients receiving regional anesthesia for minor...
When scientists report false data, does their writing style reflect their deception? In this study, we investigated the linguistic patterns of fraudulent (N = 24; 170,008 words) and genuine publications (N = 25; 189,705 words) first-authored by social psychologist Diederik Stapel. The analysis revealed that Stapel's fraudulent papers contained ling...
Significance
We show, via a massive ( N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a frien...
While we tend to think of self-presentation as a process executed by the self, reputation management on social network sites, like Facebook, is increasingly viewed as a collective endeavor. The information users share about one another can have significant impacts on impression formation, and at times this other-generated content may be face threat...
As people's online behavior increasingly leaves traces behind, it is tempting for researchers to gather and analyze these traces. This raises both ethical and logistical challenges in gathering and storing data; and in motivating people to share their data. We report on our experience developing an Android OS app to gather text messages and informa...
In an always-connected world, managing social inattention – that is, explaining the inability to interact at a particular time – can be as important as coordinating mutual availability. Inattention, particularly if repeated, can have significant relational consequences as it may be considered rude and can lead to painful social outcomes. Prior rese...
Rarely a day goes by without a new scandal that involves some kind of deception or fraud that has been perpetrated with the assistance of the Internet. Commonly, these deceptions involve people lying about who they are. These kinds of identity fraud stories are particularly compelling given the apparent ease with which individuals can craft a false...
Online dating is a popular way to meet new romantic partners, but many people fear that others are lying in their profiles. Research suggests that "fudging" (or small deceptions) are common but that big lies are relatively rare. Drawing from their Profile as Promise framework and signaling theory, the authors discuss why this happens and how it fit...
Text messaging has grown in popularity recently, particularly among young adults who
regularly use texting to coordinate and communicate to maintain relationships. Little is known,
however, about the relational context (i.e., to whom messages are sent) and temporal dynamics
(i.e., when messages are sent) of texting. Moreover, the addition of loc...
Many people assume that it is challenging to maintain the intimacy of a long‐distance (LD) relationship. However, recent research suggests that LD romantic relationships are of equal or even more trust and satisfaction than their geographically close (GC) counterparts. The present diary study tested an intimacy‐enhancing process, in which LD couple...
Motivating students to be active learners is a perennial problem in education, and is particularly challenging in lectures where instructors typically prepare content in ad-vance with little direct student participation. We describe our experience using Twitter as a tool for student "co-construction" of lecture materials. Students were required to...
Twitter is a microblogging website that has been useful as a source for human social behavioral analysis, such as political sentiment analysis, user influence, and spread of news. In this paper, we discuss a text cube approach to studying different kinds of human, social and cultural behavior (HSCB) embedded in the Twitter stream. Text cube is a ne...
In an always-connected world, managing one's unavailability for interaction with others can be as important and difficult as coordinating mutual availability. Prior studies have identified the butler lie, a linguistic strategy commonly used to manage unavailability, and examined message-level data to examine how message senders' use of butler lies...
This study proposes and tests a novel theoretical mechanism to explain increased self-disclosure intimacy in text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) versus face-to-face (FtF) interactions. On the basis of joint effects of perception intensification processes in CMC and the disclosure reciprocity norm, the authors predict a perception-behav...
Social network sites, such as Facebook, have acquired an unprecedented following, yet it is unknown what makes them so attractive to users. Here we propose that these sites' popularity can be understood through the fulfillment of ego needs. We use self-affirmation theory to hypothesize why and when people spend time on their online profiles. Study...
The rising influence of user-generated online reviews (Cone, 2011) has led to growing incentive for businesses to solicit and manufacture DECEPTIVE OPINION SPAM-fictitious reviews that have been deliberately written to sound authentic and deceive the reader. Recently, Ott et al. (2011) have introduced an opinion spam dataset containing gold standar...
The recent development of social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.) provides an unprecedented opportunity to study human social cultural behaviors. These data sources provide rich structured data (e.g., XML, relational tables, and categorical data) as well as unstructured data (e.g., texts). A significant challenge is to summarize and nav...
Modern technologies focus on connecting but do not provide good support for managing unavailability and inattention. To understand this problem, some researchers have conducted a series of studies called butler lies, one common strategy for inattention management. Butler lies are named in reference to the one-time function of a butler in managing h...
Attributions have been studied extensively in groups, yet little is known about the effects attributions have on group communication and performance. This study examines how attributions for a group failure affect socioemotional communication, procedural changes, effort, and performance on the next task. Three-member computer-mediated groups worked...
Communication and collaboration technologies have recently given rise to unprecedented flexibility in work arrangements, including telecommuting and virtual teams with geographically distributed participants. Much research has consisted of comparing distant and collocated teams, arguing that distance constrains communication opportunities, but this...
In this study, we explore several popular techniques for obtaining corpora for deception research. Through a survey of traditional as well as non-gold standard creation approaches, we identify advantages and limitations of these techniques for web-based deception detection and offer crowd-sourcing as a novel avenue toward achieving a gold standard...
Consumers' purchase decisions are increasingly influenced by user-generated online reviews. Accordingly, there has been growing concern about the potential for posting deceptive opinion spam---fictitious reviews that have been deliberately written to sound authentic, to deceive the reader. But while this practice has received considerable public at...
This study explores how Linkedin shapes patterns of deception in resumes. The general self-presentation goal to appear favorably to others motivates deception when one's true characteristics are inconsistent with their desired impression. Because Linkedin makes resume claims public, deception patterns should be altered relative to traditional resum...
Motivating students to be active in learning is a perennial problem in education. We describe our experience using Twitter for student "co-construction" of lecture materials. Students were required to tweet prior to each lecture related to that day's topic. These tweets - consisting of questions, examples and reflections - were incorporated into th...
This article investigates whether deceptions in online dating profiles correlate with changes in the way daters write about themselves in the free-text portion of the profile, and whether these changes are detectable by both computerized linguistic analyses and human judges. Computerized analyses (Study 1) found that deceptions manifested themselve...
This research explores how users conceptualize misrepresentation (their own and others’) in a specific genre of online self-presentation: the online dating profile. Using qualitative data collected from 37 online dating participants, we explore user understandings of self-presentational practices, specifically how discrepancies between one’s online...
The prevalence of both deception and communication technology in our personal and professional lives has given rise to an important set of questions at the intersection of deception and technology, referred to as 'digital deception'. These questions include issues concerned with deception and self-presentation, such as how the Internet can facilita...
Purpose. This study used statistical text analysis to examine the features of crime narratives provided by psychopathic homicide offenders. Psychopathic speech was predicted to reflect an instrumental/predatory world view, unique socioemotional needs, and a poverty of affect.
Methods. Two text analysis tools were used to examine the crime narrative...
Consumers increasingly rate, review and research products online.
Consequently, websites containing consumer reviews are becoming targets of
opinion spam. While recent work has focused primarily on manually identifiable
instances of opinion spam, in this work we study deceptive opinion
spam---fictitious opinions that have been deliberately written...
The importance of emotion to group outcomes in FtF highlights the need to understand emotion contagion in distributed groups. The present study examines the transfer of negative emotion in online groups. Negative emotion was induced in one of three group members completing a task in CMC. The data suggest that emotion contagion took place at the gro...
In response to the death of a close friend or relative, bereaved individuals can use technology as part of the grieving process. We present a study that analyzes the messages of the friends and family of the deceased to their Facebook profile before and after their passing. Our analysis reveals that mourners use profiles as a way to maintain a cont...
Group cohesiveness is a vital social dynamic that is difficult to achieve in virtual teams, but leadership can help groups move past these challenges. We used the Language Style Matching metric to measure group cohesiveness over the course of interaction while groups with either assigned or emerging leaders worked via online chat to complete a coll...
The proliferation of communication technology has led to potential stratification of contacts across different media, which has important implications for interpersonal dynamics, such as deception. The present study examines how two text-based communication media, BBM and SMS, involve different kinds of social contact networks, and how these differ...
In this paper, we analyze the way in which international Facebook users who had recently moved to the United States used different languages to selectively self-disclose to their old (native-language) and new (English-speaking) social circles. We found significantly more intimate self-disclosure, covering a broader range of cognitive and emotional...
The present research investigated whether the attribution process through which people explain self-disclosures differs in text-based computer-mediated interactions versus face to face, and whether differences in causal attributions account for the increased intimacy frequently observed in mediated communication. In the experiment participants were...