Information manipulation theory (IMT) is a theory of deceptive discourse production, rooted in H. Paul Grice's theory of conversational implicature. IMT argues that, rather than communicators producing truths and lies, the vast majority of everyday deceptive discourse involves complicated combinations of elements that fall somewhere in between these polar opposites; with the most common form of deception being the omission of contextually problematic information, commonly known as white lies. More specifically, individuals have four different ways of misleading others: playing with the amount of relevant information that is shared, including false information, presenting irrelevant information, and/or presenting information in a vague or ambiguous fashion. As long as such manipulations remain undetected by recipients, deception will succeed. Two of the most important practical implications of IMT are that deceivers commonly use messages composed entirely of truthful information to deceive; and that because this is the case, our ability to detect deception in real-world environments is extremely limited.
History and central themes In the fall of 1987 and early spring of 1988, deception scholar Steven McCornack - then a doctoral student at the University of Illinois - collected data for his dissertation. Somewhat unwittingly McCornack employed a method not used by prior deception researchers. At that time, most deception researchers instructed study participants to either "lie" or "tell the truth." McCornack, however, gave participants in his study no such guidance. Instead, he placed them in situations that had provoked other people to lie, and asked them what they would say (he previously had gathered data on the kinds of situations that trigger lying amongst college students). Fully expecting to be able to code his data in terms of "truth" versus "falsity," McCornack was stunned to observe that the messages that had been generated defied such a dichotomy. The typical message in his data involved complex combinations of truthful and false elements. In his subsequent dissertation, McCornack argued that deceivers manipulate two primary dimensions when seeking to mislead others: the amount of information that is shared, and whether or not such information is distorted. Two years later, while an assistant professor at Michigan State University, McCornack revisited his dissertation data. Dissatisfied with his dissertation's two-dimensional characterization of messages (i.e., "amount of information" and "distortion of information"), he sought the counsel of his doctoral advisor, Barbara O'Keefe, who recommended that he draw upon Paul Grice's theory of conversational implicature as the theoretical foundation. Reanalyzing his data from a four-dimensional Gricean perspective (see below), McCornack found an almost perfect goodness-of-fit, and authored a series of conference papers explicating his analysis. In 1992, McCornack published two articles that are recognized as the seminal works in information manipulation theory. In his first article, McCornack lays out the basic premise of IMT, namely that deception messages derive from covert violations of conversational maxims, and that “deceptive messages function deceptively because they violate the principles that govern conversational exchanges”. The second article, written in collaboration with noted deception scholar Timothy Levine provided an empirical test of the theory.
Prior work on deceptive discourse forms Prior to the publication of information manipulation theory, a handful of studies had examined the various ways people play with information when misleading others; although no collective theoretical framework had been posited connecting these works to one another. The most influential of these, in shaping McCornack's thinking, was a study by Turner, Edgley, and Olmstead examining information control during important conversations. Turner et al. had participants record an important conversation, and then self-analyze how many of their utterances were completely honest, versus those that controlled information in significant ways. They observed several forms of information control, and described them in terms of categories, including "lies", "exaggerations", "half-truths", "secrets", and "diversionary responses". They also observed that the vast majority (61.5%) of utterances in important conversations were not completely honest, but controlled information in some fashion. Other scholars also had posited taxonomies of deception types. In 1984, Hopper and Bell introduced a typology of deceptive types using English terms, including "fictions", "playings", "lies", "crimes", "masks", and "unlies". In 1986, Metts and Chronis posited deception as something that arises when communicators are faced with complicated contexts involving multiple and competing goals. Metts and Chronis depicted variation in deceptive discourse as varying on a continuum of covert to overt misrepresentation of information.
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