Been There, Done That: How Episodic and Semantic Memory Affects the Language of Authentic and Fictitious Reviews


 This paper suggests a theory-driven approach to address the managerial problem of distinguishing between real and fake reviews. Building on memory research and linguistics, we predict that when recollecting an authentic experience in a product review, people rely to a greater extent on episodic memory. By contrast, when writing a fictitious review, people do not have episodic memory available to them. Therefore, they must rely to a greater extent on semantic memory. We suggest that reliance on these different memory types is reflected in the language used in authentic and fictitious reviews. We develop predictions about five linguistic features characterizing authentic versus fictitious reviews. We test our predictions via a multi-method approach, combining computational linguistics, experimental design, and machine learning. We employ a large-scale experiment to derive a dataset of reviews, as well as two datasets containing reviews from online platforms. We also test whether an algorithm relying on our theory-driven linguistic features is context-independent, relative to other benchmark algorithms, and shows better cross-domain performance when tested across datasets. By developing a theory that extends memory and psycholinguistics research to the realm of word of mouth, this work contributes to our understanding of how authentic and fictitious reviews are created.