Verbal Deception Cue Training for the Detection of Phishing Emails

Abstract

Training on cues to deception is one of the promising ways of addressing humans’ poor performance in deception detection. However, the effect of training may be subject to the context of deception and the design of training. This study aims to investigate the effect of verbal cue training on the performance of phishing email detection by comparing different designs of training and examining the effect of topic familiarity. Based on the results of a lab experiment, we not only confirm the effect of training but also provide suggestions on how to design training to better facilitate the detection of phishing emails. In addition, our results also discover the effect of topic familiarity on phishing detection. The findings of this study have significant implications for the mitigation and intervention of online deception.