Relationship among economic crisis, stock market crashes and accounting scandals

Purpose: This work investigates the relationships between stock exchange crashes and accounting scandals.Design/methodology: We analyze the main accounting scandals and stock exchange crashes that occurred between 1980 and 2020. Findings: First of all, it was verified that a stock market crash occurred in the years in which most of the accounting scandals took place (or within the next three years). This evidence is consistent with much of the previous literature. Second, an average of 5.4 years has been estimated as the period of time that elapses between the time a company starts engaging in accounting deception and the moment when it is discovered and the scandal breaks out. Third, it has been found that accounting deception is more likely to occur in years with stock market crashes and in the years immediately following. The literature review revealed no evidence supporting the two latter hypotheses.Research limitations/implications: This exploratory work has several limitations. First of all, only scandals that have been reported on websites in Spanish and English have been analyzed. Therefore, the sample may be biased, giving more weight to companies from Anglo-Saxon and Spanish-speaking countries. Second, the sample was made up of a small number of companies (53), which are those that have met the search criteria used.Practical implications: The findings of this work are relevant today, since a major stock exchange crash has occurred as a result of the coronavirus. Therefore, if the pattern of the most recent decades is repeated, it would be expected that more accounting scandals will come to light in the coming years.Social implications: The conclusions obtained are of great relevance for the different users of the financial information from companies, and also for auditors, consultants and supervisory bodies, since due to the stock exchange crash triggered by COVID-19, they will need to exercise extreme caution in the coming years in relation to financial information.Originality/value: The work provides evidence on the relationship between stock market crashes and accounting scandals, which is a highly relevant topic. The literature review revealed no study using the same methodology or a similar sample of companies.

Detecting Deception Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning in Datasets on COVID-19 and Climate Change

Deception in computer-mediated communication represents a threat, and there is a growing need to develop efficient methods of detecting it. Machine learning models have, through natural language processing, proven to be extremely successful at detecting lexical patterns related to deception. In this study, four selected machine learning models are trained and tested on data collected through a crowdsourcing platform on the topics of COVID-19 and climate change. The performance of the models was tested by analyzing n-grams (from unigrams to trigrams) and by using psycho-linguistic analysis. A selection of important features was carried out and further deepened with additional testing of the models on different subsets of the obtained features. This study concludes that the subjectivity of the collected data greatly affects the detection of hidden linguistic features of deception. The psycho-linguistic analysis alone and in combination with n-grams achieves better classification results than an n-gram analysis while testing the models on own data, but also while examining the possibility of generalization, especially on trigrams where the combined approach achieves a notably higher accuracy of up to 16%. The n-gram analysis proved to be a more robust method during the testing of the mutual applicability of the models while psycho-linguistic analysis remained most inflexible.

Detecting deception using machine learning with facial expressions and pulse rate.

Given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, remote interviews have become an increasingly popular approach in many fields. For example, a survey by the HR Research Institute (PCR Institute in Survey on hiring activities for graduates of 2021 and 2022. https://www.hrpro.co.jp/research_detail.php?r_no=273. Accessed 03 Oct 2021) shows that more than 80% of job interviews are conducted remotely, particularly in large companies. However, for some reason, an interviewee might attempt to deceive an interviewer or feel difficult to tell the truth. Although the ability of interviewers to detect deception among interviewees is significant for their company or organization, it still strongly depends on their individual experience and cannot be automated. To address this issue, in this study, we propose a machine learning approach to aid in detecting whether a person is attempting to deceive the interlocutor by associating the features of their facial expressions with those of their pulse rate. We also constructed a more realistic dataset for the task of deception detection by asking subjects not to respond artificially, but rather to improvise natural responses using a web camera and wearable device (smartwatch). The results of an experimental evaluation of the proposed approach with 10-fold cross-validation using random forests classifier show that the accuracy and the F1 value were in the range between 0.75 and 0.8 for each subject, and the highest values were 0.87 and 0.88, respectively. Through the analysis of the importance of the features the trained models, we revealed the crucial features of each subject during deception, which differed among the subjects.

A Deep Learning Powered System to Lie Detection While Online Study

Many education facilities have recently switched to online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The nature of online learning makes it easier for dishonest behaviors, such as cheating or lying during lessons. We propose a new artificial intelligence - powered solution to help educators solve this rising problem for a fairer learning environment. We created a visual representation contrastive learning method with the MobileNetV2 network as the backbone to improve predictability from an unlabeled dataset which can be deployed on low power consumption devices. The experiment shows an accuracy of up to 59%, better than several previous research, proving the usability of this approach.

Judging the quality of (fake) news on the internet

The only reliable remedy against anxiety is information, and reliable information and news are of crucial value in times of crises, such as COVID-19. Contemporary social media offers almost everyone a platform to publish one's own thoughts, opinions, political statements and others, some of which may gain significant interest of others and thereby become so called "influencers". This role has in the past been held by news agencies primarily, but this role is increasingly adopted also by private people and among them, also some who do not necessarily adhere the high standards of good journalism or scientific ethics. These give rise to fake news, spreading as unconfirmed rumors and possibly causing dramatic impacts to a society. With information available almost everywhere in the internet today, the distinction between good and bad sources has become a challenge, and highly difficult task. Even more intricate is the question of verifying information against multiple independent sources. If many people say something, does this make it true or any more plausible? Do we need to trust information in lack of better information? Is it possible to judge information and make our own opinion about its validity, quality, relevance or usefulness for our own business? This article shall provide pointers towards answers to the above questions. We discuss some technical means of judging the quality of information and what anyone, even without much technical background can do to avoid falling victim to fake information and fake news. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Can you see me lying? Investigating the role of deception on gaze behavior

• Observers fixated longer on the mouth and torso of speakers when those were deceptive. • Observers fixated longer on the hands of the speakers when those were honest. • When assessing veracity, unexpectedly, observers fixated on the mouth the most compared to the eyes, torso, or hands of the speakers. • Longer fixations on the mouth and torso of the speakers were associated with less credible assessment of the speakers. • Longer gaze fixations on the torso and left hand of the speakers worsened deception detection accuracy. Throughout the early part of this century, and especially during the peak of the global pandemic of 2020, the world has come to rely increasingly on computer-mediated communication (CMC). The study of computer-based media and their role in mediating communication has long been a part of the academic study of information systems. Unfortunately, human communication, regardless of the medium over which it occurs, involves deception. Despite the growing reliance on CMC for communication, a limited amount of work has considered deception and its detection in mediated environments. The study reported here investigates the communication issues associated with cue restrictions in CMC, specifically videoconferencing, and with how these restrictions affect deception detection success. We employed eye tracking technology to analyze the visual behavior of veracity judges and how it influenced their assessments. We found that the visual foci of the judges varied as a result of the message veracity. Judges fixated longer on the mouth and torso of speakers when messages were deceptive and focused longer on the hands of the speakers when messages were truthful. We also found that fixating longer on the mouth and torso of the speakers was associated with less credible assessment of the speakers. Last, longer gaze fixations on the torso and left hand of the speakers resulted in less accurate deception detection performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies is the property of Academic Press Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Addressing cyber deception and abuse from a human factors perspective

The role of technology has undoubtedly evolved into amplifying attackers' ability to use the cyber space for the deceit and abuse of Internet users. This dissertation seeks to investigate these problems from the lens of deceptive and abusive content (e.g., phishing, social engineering, dis- or misinformation, intimate partner surveillance). Phishing is an extremely popular cyber-social engineering attack that come with great costs to society-at-large, and along with mis- and disinformation, has risen to society's collective consciousness after the 2016 and 2020 U.S. General Elections, as well as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, research into crimes of abuse surrounding intimate partner violence (IPV), colloquially known as domestic abuse, is still in its infancy, yet IPS allows abusers to stalk, monitor, intimidate, and harass their victims as a form of further control. This thesis seeks to tackle these issues through a multi-methods approach, including natural language processing to detect the presence of influence cues in text, qualitative methods, and rigorous statistical analyses. I detail how cyber abuse is leveraged in social media, how expert advice can negative affect minorities, and investigate how subtle online toxicity can be automatically detected. I then investigate several different ways to mitigate the harms of online deception. The work detailed in this dissertation has resulted in novel and publicly available datasets that may pave the way for further novel mitigations and solutions within their fields and to the global problem of cyber deception and abuse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

People lie less when they put on a medical face mask.

The current study examined how a face mask people wore during the COVID-19 pandemic affects frequent lying and successful telling and detecting lies and truths in a face-to-face deception task. Participants were psychology students who acted as senders and receivers of true and false communications under three conditions: visible face, wearing a face mask, and blindfolding in addition to the face mask. Participants arrived in groups of eight. They first completed a lying questionnaire and then participated in the deception task. Their goal was to outperform the rest of the group to retain a bonus of additional course credit. Results indicated that participants reduced the number of lies told when wearing the face mask compared to chance expectancy (d = -.27) and visible face (d = -0.21). In addition, participants were more successful in detecting truths in the face mask condition than in the visible face condition (d = 0.21). Finally, self-assessed lie-telling ability predicted frequent lying in the face mask but not in the other conditions. It was suggested that participants wearing the face mask were affected by the attitudes and norms that prevailed during the COVID-19 pandemic, where consideration was required, and people were relatively thoughtful and kind. The face mask reminded participants of these norms and motivated participants to act accordingly.

Masking the truth: the impact of face masks on deception detection.

Because of the pandemic, face masks have become ubiquitous in social interactions, but it remains unclear how face masks influence the ability to discriminate between truthful and deceptive statements. The current study manipulated the presence of face masks, statement veracity, statement valence (positive or negative), and whether the statements had been practiced or not. Despite participants' expectations, face masks generally did not impair detection accuracy. However, participants were more accurate when judging negatively valenced statements when the speaker was not wearing a face mask. Participants were also more likely to believe positively rather than negatively valenced statements.

Does pandemic denial help or harm? Belief in and experience of COVID-19 as factors affecting psychological consequences of using neurotic defence mechanisms

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic may activate thoughts of death, leading to aversive psychological states. In such situations, defence mechanisms emerge;however, their adaptability depends on many factors. The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between neurotic defence style and depressive symptoms. We assumed that the sense of coherence underlies this correlation and investigated how both believing (or not) in COVID-19 and having (or not) experience of this disease differentiate this mechanism. Methods: This cross-sectional study (N = 720) was conducted through an online panel. Results: For COVID-19 believers who had no experience of the disease, the higher their neurotic defence style, the lower their sense of coherence, which was negatively correlated with depressive symptoms. The same pattern was found for non-believers who have experienced COVID-19. In the group of individuals who believed and experienced COVID-19, the relationship between neurotic defence style and sense of coherence was non-significant. In turn, respondents who neither believed in nor have experienced COVID-19 displayed a positive relationship between neurotic defence style and sense of coherence. Discussion: Although self-deception strategies might be adaptive, they contribute to increased distress, if continued to be used once an individual confronts reality.

Deception and Lie Detection in the Courtroom: The Effect of Defendants Wearing Medical Face Masks.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, defendants and witnesses (as well as the prosecution and defense counsel) may wear medical face masks to prevent the spread of the virus. Alternatively, courtrooms proceedings may take place virtually. In this article, we discuss how these deviations from normal procedures may affect jurors' lie detection ability and decision-making. Although research addressing this specific question does not exist, we are able to formulate an informed view based on the extensive deception literature. Since nonverbal signs of deception in the face and body are virtually absent, we conclude that medical face mask-wearing or virtual courtroom proceedings will not hamper jurors' lie detection abilities. If jurors can hear the speech well, they may become better at detecting deception if they pay more attention to speech content, which may occur as a result of mask-wearing in the courtroom.

Critical Path to Place Decoys in Deception Biota

With the rapid growth of cloud or on-premises storage, widespread networking and other physical devices, complex IT infrastructure and processes for creating, processing, and storing all forms of electronic data, securing data that too in the initial compromise phase is critical, so it doesn't translate back into a cyber-attack. During the covid pandemic where the whole world was working from open networks, data breaches and cyber security issues have gone to their peak. Intruders are moving laterally compromising data intelligently following various techniques like delaying the attack cycle where the intruder enters the network, gathers information, and stays away for a couple of days so that their previous interaction goes faded. This article describes the collaborative pattern analysis and event chaining of the compromised data during the reconnaissance phase of the attack chain and enables deception technology by enhancing predictability and planning to place decoys in the network dynamically. Deception technology can understand instantaneous data and provide verdicts based on real-time interactions. If any suspicious behaviour encountered by the decoys for that instance is co-related well with the attack matrix an alarm is being raised where decoys generate lures which create a false information stream that leads attackers exposed while protecting real enterprise network and assets. However, the current setup is not enabled to a level where it can track attackers who are working from multiple endpoints at the same time or using the gained data from the scans to access in the future. We are proposing a new and efficient Event chaining-based solution (named as DT-Chains) that overcomes the limitations in earlier proposed solutions. As part of this framework, we propose to design and develop a solution that will do an analysis on reconnaissance Attack Data. This newly proposed solution is expected to enable existing deception Technology to reduce false positives and helps to track attackers which are working from multiple endpoints at the same time or using the gained data from the scans to access in the future. This will also help in predicting the attack critical path which enables automated deception triggers for decoys. © 2022 Totem Publisher, Inc.

The role of ‘non-knowledge' in crisis policymaking: a proposal and agenda for future research

Background:Recent complex and cross-boundary policy problems, such as climate change, pandemics, and financial crises, have recentred debates about state capacity, democratic discontent and the ‘crisis of expertise'. These problems are contested and open to redefinition, misunderstanding, spin, and deception, challenging the ability of policymakers to locate, discriminate, comprehend, and respond to competing sources of knowledge and expertise. We argue that ‘non-knowledge' is an under-explored aspect of responses to major policy crises.Key points:While discussed in recent work in sociology and other social sciences, non-knowledge has been given less explicit attention in policy studies, and is not fully captured by orthodox understandings of knowledge and evidence use. We outline three main forms of non-knowledge that challenge public agencies: amnesia, ignorance and misinformation. In each case, ‘non-knowledge' is not simply the absence of policy-relevant knowledge. Amnesia refers to what is forgotten, reinvented or ‘unlearned', while claims of ignorance involve obscuring or casting aside of relevant knowledge that could (or even should) be available. To be misinformed is to actively believe false or misleading information. In each instance, non-knowledge may have strategic value for policy actors or aid the pursuit of self-interest.Conclusions and implications:We demonstrate the relevance of non-knowledge through a brief case study, emerging from the inquiry into the COVID-19 hotel quarantine programme in the Australian state of Victoria. We argue that both amnesia and ‘practical' forms of ignorance contributed to failures during the early part of the programme.

Tackling false advertising and strengthening consumer protection in emerging economies

False advertising has many negative consequences for the protection of consumer rights and wellbeing. In emerging economies in particular, false advertising has been widespread across business sectors and products due to inadequate public policy and ineffective law enforcement. Since the COVID-19 global pandemic has spread around the world, people have become more dependent on e-commerce for purchasing goods and services, and the negative impact has become historically high with increasing number of advertising and sales cyber-fakes However, prior studies have not focused on consumers' perceived deception and information asymmetry in false advertising in general, and the consequent implications for public policy in controlling and eliminating such problems, specifically in emerging economies. This study focuses on the example of China as a leading emerging economy to investigate the relevant issues and contribute to extant knowledge by linking separate paradigms with a new holistic conceptual framework that identifies the key elements of contextual factors, consumers' perceived deception and information asymmetry, the causes and impacts, and the expected policy implications for further prevention.

Massive Deception Masquerading as Information and Communication: A (largely) Derridean Perspective

We live in a time of major events in civilisational history, currently centred on the so-called Covid-19 "pandemic." In this global context, contemporary people are at the mercy, largely, of powerful media companies that disseminate officially sanctioned news and opinion pieces about all aspects pertaining to the "pandemic." The very same thing that makes this mainstream media hegemony possible, however, namely the Internet, also allows alternative news sources to circulate censored news and critical opinion so that one witnesses an information and communication-divide on a scale never seen before in history. This paper sets out to reconstruct this information and communication chasm with reference to representative instances of each of the adversarial sides in what may be called a "war of information" and attempts to make this intelligible by interpreting these mainly through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida, supplemented by a coda enlisting Jurgen Habermas's work on communication. While the latter does foresee the possibility of authentic communication ("communicative action") despite the constant spectre of miscommunication ("strategic action"), Derrida is less optimistic about this. Instead, taking his cue from Joyce's Ulysses, he insists that the very means of "reaching" the other in the act of communicating are also, ineluctably, the means for failing to reach them, and that "receiving" a message from someone can thus either result in a mechanical repetition of the message, or a paradoxical "repeating differently." Moreover, elsewhere he indicates the paradoxical implications of a change of "context" as far as an utterance is concerned. This difference between these two thinkers allows one to get an intellectual grip on the situation unfolding in the world in 2021-2022;a world of ubiquitous information exchanges, implicitly claiming to be communicational exchanges. More specifically, Derrida and Habermas equip one with the communication-theoretical means to ascertain what this plethora of information exchanges amounts to.

Deception in the era of digital technologies and the distortion of reality and facts: An X-Ray of Nigerian peculiarities

The phenomenal increase in the level of digital technologies has in no small measure enabled and opened new vista of possibilities that were hitherto inconceivable before the advent of these digital technologies. Indeed, this phenomenon has also increased the ‘crescendo’ of various seemingly impossible trends in the area of circulation of information in the globalised world in ways such as global rapid communication, unhindered and constant access to information, democratised production and dissemination of information and digital content, and the ability to coordinate global political activities or movements through several populist strategies and political antics employed by politicians. Currently, it is somewhat seemed intractable to separate truth from falsehood due to striking similarities in the appearance of the two. However, these phenomena have brought about untoward development resulting in the amplification of various forms of digital deceptions peddled on several digital devices. Like other countries, Nigeria, too, is battling with the rise in populism politics, fake news, ethnic nationalism (laden with ethnic jingoism), hate and dangerous speech and other kinds of digital deceptions, among others. The escalating herder-farmer communal clashes, ethno-religious crises in some states in Nigeria, a tsunami of misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19, as well as political tensions between the two dominant political parties (All Progressives Congress and People’s Democratic Party (PDP)), have been influenced by deceptions, untruths and political propaganda. Therefore, through extensive interaction with (and review of) both the extant and current literature, this paper: provides further insights into the evolving issues regarding deceptions, fake news, epistemic errors as well as democratic and social harms emanating from deceptions in the Nigerian polity. The methodology used in this paper involves a comprehensive but selective literature review conducted to locate papers (Journal articles and theses or dissertations) on the foregoing evolving issues. Also, literature related to each of the analyses of the trend of fake news and other forms of digital deceptions in the light of the emerging post-truth era and their potential impacts on the country is incorporated into the review. However, a conclusion is drawn from the findings while the paper recommends that curtailing the influence of digital deceptions and fake news on the body polity of Nigeria requires collective responsibility of all the stakeholders coupled with enhanced steps (which include but are not limited to: credibility, media skills, regulation, collaboration, media literacy, professionalism, gatekeeping, self-censorship as well as detection) towards fighting the menace and morbidity of digital deceptions in the country. © The Author(s) 2022.

Tourist scams, moral emotions and behaviors: impacts on moral emotions, dissatisfaction, revisit intention and negative word of mouth

Purpose>Drawing upon affective events theory (AET), this study aims to explore the relationship between tourists’ perceived deception and moral emotions, dissatisfaction, revisit intention and negative word of mouth.Design/methodology/approach>Online data from Questionnaire Star were used to examine the proposed research model. A total of 437 valid questionnaires were collected.Findings>The results suggest that tourist scams as “affective events” could trigger tourists’ moral emotions and dissatisfaction, thereby decreasing their revisit intention and generating negative word of mouth. Additionally, moral emotions were found to act as a mediator between perceived deception and dissatisfaction.Research limitations/implications>The insights uncovered in this study reveal the mechanisms behind tourists’ reactions to scams and provide implications for tourism destinations, suggesting ways to alleviate the adverse impact of tourist scams.Originality/value>To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the very first study to investigate tourists’ reactions to tourist scams.

An Implausible Virtual Interview: Conversations with a Professional Research Subject

The author explores interactions with one research subject who feigns credentials and invents stories in order to participate in social science research interviews online. The possibility of intentional deception among interviewees in virtually mediated fieldwork is a critical consideration in the context of the recent extensive pivot to online-based fieldwork during the need for social distancing associated with the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Following this rapid shift in what is generally accepted as the “gold standard” for social science research interviews, widespread use of online-based interviewing methods will likely endure as equivalent to in-person methods. A methodological case study with implications for virtually mediated fieldwork, this article highlights some of the advantages and disadvantages of virtually mediated interviews and provides practical suggestions. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Sociological Methodology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Munchausen by Internet and false perinatal crises

Background: In representative cases of Munchausen by internet (MBI), an individual (or "poser") goes online to falsely report or exaggerate illnesses or life crises. The principal goal, as in factitious disorder imposed on self or another, is to garner emotional satisfaction. We provide the first evidence that MBI can target a specific type of health care provider-in this case, birthing doulas. Methods: We describe 5 cases in which individuals have utilized social media platforms to report factitious perinatal illnesses and crises, including neonatal death, in real time. Current health headlines, such as those involving the COVID-19 pandemic, can be relevant to the ruses. Posers can engage in deceptions with several health care professionals concurrently or serially, and may portray multiple people ("sock puppets") at the same time. Results: MBI has consequences that can be highly disruptive. In the cases highlighted in this report, many hours of support were given to individuals who had fabricated their pregnancies, infants, and perinatal complications. The doulas experienced feelings ranging from resignation to anger and betrayal. Conclusions: Health care professionals of all types who offer services online should be vigilant to the risks of potential MBI. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)