Summary: How do you convince a stranger to help you commit a multi-billion dollar crime? By using a specific “linguistic playbook” designed to manufacture trust.
Researchers have analyzed the world’s largest collection of spoken language records from illegal activity, the Enron transcripts. The study identifies five distinct “trust moves” that traders used to coordinate market manipulation and legitimize wrongdoing across multiple organizations.
Key Facts
- The Enron Corpus: The study utilized thousands of taped phone calls where traders discussed artificially constraining energy supply to drive up prices.
- Trust Management: Enron traders spent a disproportionately higher amount of their speaking time on “trust management” compared to the external people they were manipulating.
- Defensive Repairs: A key finding was the total lack of accountability. When trust was threatened, traders almost never apologized; they instead used justification to keep the illicit collaboration on track.
- Diagnostic Potential: This framework isn’t just for history; it is being used to develop interventions for modern phishing scams, romance scams, and online radicalization.
- Ideological Networks: The same linguistic patterns are being found in extremist forums and “ideological harm networks” (like incel communities), helping experts understand how individuals are lured into dangerous groups.
Source: University of Birmingham
New research has revealed the linguistic moves made by energy traders to manipulate trust and encourage collusion in illicit activity, misleading clients and officials, and supporting forms of corruption that spanned many organisations.
Forensic linguists from the University of Birmingham looked at how trust develops in real time, and how it is managed, repaired, and maintained in conversation, to ensure future collaboration.
The study, published by Cambridge University Press, used records from the Enron scandal. This was no ordinary fraud, and it went beyond creative accounting. Enron traders secured the trust of people working in external organizations to gain access to and control energy infrastructure, artificially constraining supply and driving up market prices.
These coordinated market moves were often discussed and arranged on the phone – and the clandestine conversations were taped, creating a ‘corpus’ of transcripts that is the world’s largest collection of spoken language records from illegal activity.
Linguistic analysis of these transcripts, led by Dr Matteo Fuoli, showed a larger share of speech by Enron traders dedicated to trust management compared to external speakers.
It also revealed a playbook of trust-related moves, which fell into five basic categories: bond, build, confide, probe, and repair.
Dr Fuoli said: “Access to covert conversations is rare. The size of the corpus meant we were able to produce a comprehensive framework for conversational tactics that can be used to build and manage trust and legitimize wrong-doing.”
The analysis showed ‘bond’ moves predominated in the conversations, with Enron traders fostering emotional connection, and projecting a persona of a friendly and supportive listener.
The ‘build trust’ moves provided rational arguments about why the listener should trust the speaker, including boasting to project competence.
Unsurprisingly, Enron traders used ‘confide’ moves, including sharing privileged information, significantly more often than external speakers, and while ‘probe’ moves were mostly used by external speakers, Enron speakers used ‘repair’ moves frequently, and these were primarily defensive (justification, or shifting the blame), with apologies and outright denials being rare.
Dr Fuoli is part of Lingsight, a team of world-class linguists from the University of Birmingham, UK, with a track record that includes major publicly-funded research projects and collaborations with top technology firms.
Dr Matteo Fuoli: “The framework has a diagnostic potential and can inform practical interventions in combating fraud such as phishing or romance scams, but also online radicalization in extremist discussion forums, and ideological harm networks like incel. It could also be used to identify the roles and relationships within a specific criminal network.”
“Similarly, studying the trust dynamics within extremist or ideological harm networks online could deepen our understanding of how and why individuals are drawn to these groups and guide the development of well-informed social policies and educational interventions.”
Key Questions Answered:
A: It’s called the “Confide” move. When someone shares “privileged” information with you, it triggers a psychological sense of reciprocity and belonging. You feel like an “insider,” which makes you more likely to overlook the illegal nature of the information because you feel loyal to the person who trusted you with it.
A: Almost never. The study found that “Repair” moves were strictly defensive. Instead of saying “I’m sorry,” traders would shift the blame to a third party or use a “justification” to make the illegal act seem like a standard business move.
A: Yes. By identifying these five moves (Bond, Build, Confide, Probe, Repair), cybersecurity experts can train AI and humans to recognize the specific “rhythm” of a trust-based scam, whether it’s a phishing email or a long-term romance scam.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by our staff.
About this linguistics and psychology research news
Author: Ruth Ashton
Source: University of Birmingham
Contact: Ruth Ashton – University of Birmingham
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
