Text Manipulation Judgment Accuracy

Deception aims to affect a decision-making process in a way that somehow benefits the deceiver. More knowledge is desired in the area of purely text-based scenarios. Thirty-seven graduate students at the Air Force Institute of Technology participated in an experiment in order to gain an initial understanding of how people determine whether text has been manipulated, and to identify specific areas that may be more closely investigated in future research. Excerpts were drawn from editions of a current-events newsletter that the participants receive on a weekly basis as part of then enrollment in the graduate program.


Some of the excerpts were manipulated, and others were not. Participants were shown a set of these excerpts and were asked to give ratings of their perceived familiarity with the subject of the excerpt, their perception of the relevance of that subject to themselves, and their perception of whether they believed that the excerpt had been manipulated.