What makes deceptive online reviews? A linguistic analysis perspective

With the rapid development of e-commerce, online reviews have become an important information source for consumers and e-commerce businesses. While the negative impact of deceptive online reviews has been well recognized, more research has to be done to help understand the linguistic manifestations of deceptive online reviews in order to help identify deceptive reviews and help increase the value and sustainability of e-commerce businesses. This study explores the linguistic manifestations of deceptive online reviews based on the reality monitoring theory, and then uses the data from Amazon.com online product reviews to examine perceptual cues, affective cues, detail cues, relevance cues, and cognitive cues of various deceptive online reviews. The results show that reviews for emotional catharsis are more extreme with affective cues, while perfunctory reviews often lack details with fewer prepositions and adjectives. In addition, deceptive reviews often lack relevance cues when these reviews are made to obtain the rewards provided by the vendors while paid posters tend to use more cognitive cues in deceptive reviews. Moreover, deceptive online reviews under all motives often lack perceptual cues. These findings provide a deeper understanding of the linguistic manifestations of deceptive online reviews and provide significant managerial implications for e-commerce businesses to employ high-quality online reviews for sustainable growth.