The fraudsters’ playbook: our study of Enron traders shows how easily the language of trust can be abused

By Matteo Fuoli, Associate Professor in Corpus-based Discourse Analysis, Department of Linguistics and Communication, University of Birmingham

From election debates to job interviews, language shapes our perceptions of how trustworthy other people are. This power can be used to build healthy relationships, but it can also be used to manipulate and deceive.

To better understand this darker side of building trust, my colleagues and I turned to the corporate world – a domain that offers plenty of cautionary tales. Our case study was among the most notorious, involving one of the world’s largest energy companies of the 1980s and 90s: Enron.

This…

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