The objective of this research is to investigate the phone deceptions from the aspect of cognitive science. Phone deceptiol cases are increasing as the mobile communication becomes pervasive in the past decade. Although many deception preventive methods are proposed by the national police agency, the deception cases are still growing fast. It is strange that even higher education people cannot avoid being deceived. It becomes an urgent and challenging issue for government to cope with this phenomenon. Moreover, according to the past literature, it is found that most of the relevant literature merely focused on the studies of face-to-face deception. Although some studies did examine the non face-to-face computer internet deceptions, no study has been found to focus on the phone deceptions. Specifically, the phone deception is characterized by the non face-to-face and the low-detected cue circumstance.
In order to fulfill the research goals stated above, an empirical case study methodology is adopted. The present authors proposed a dual-dimensional research conceptual framework. The first dimension includes the investigations of cognitive interaction from both sides of a deception. Both sides of a deception include ‘deceiver’ and ‘detector’. And the deceptive procedure, which indicates the second dimension, is divided into four phases. They are ‘initial contact’, ‘deception design’, ‘deception action’, and ‘deception closing setup’. In terms of the proposed research frameworks, three types of the most popular phone deceptions are chosen as the empirical cases. They are ‘winning a lottery deception’, ’credit card deception’ and ‘kidnapping deception’.
Based on the interview data collected from 18 deception cases, this study came up the following conclusions: Firstly no significant difference for the frequency of cognitive interaction is found among the three types of deception; Secondly, there are significant differences among the four-phase deceptive procedure; Thirdly, the third phase is the most crucial phase for the deception being happened. In particular, with respect to the results derived from content analyses, a cognitive interactive model for the phone deception is finally proposed. The research findings and their implications are further discussed in the following.
