Type of Document	Dissertation
Author	Furner, Christopher Paul
Author's Email Address	chris.furner@gmail.com
URN	etd-06272008-140741
Title	Cultural Determinants of Media Choice for Deception
Degree	Doctor of Philosophy
Department	Management Information Systems, Department of
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Joey F. George Committee Chair Ashley Bush Committee Member David Paradice Committee Member Lee Stepina Committee Member
Keywords	Media Choice Media Selection Culture Deception Lying
Date of Defense	2008-06-25
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract 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.
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