Task Complexity and Deception Detection in a Collaborative Group Setting

Deception and deception detection have become important research areas in business. However, little deception research has looked at the computer-mediated group settings that many organizational decisions are made in today. Further, past research has not looked at the influence of task complexity, a key part of group decision processes, on deception. This study looked at these unexplored areas by conducting an experiment to measure the effects of task complexity on group deception detection and group performance. Our findings revealed very low overall detection rates and showed no significant differences in the detection rates between groups performing tasks with different levels of complexity. We did find that even though all groups had the assets necessary to perform well, groups with the complex task performed significantly worse than groups with the less complex task, signaling that these groups were more affected by deception.