Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to examine the dynamics of emotional cues and cognitive cues in review fakeness. Additionally, the boundary condition (i.e. review valence) for the dynamics between emotional cues and cognitive cues is investigated.

Design/methodology/approach – This research conducted two studies, which analyzed restaurant and hotel reviews collected from Yelp.com. The authors adopted linguistic inquiry and word count 2015 to code review contents and tested the hypotheses using logistic regression.

Findings – Fake reviews contain more emotional cues compared with authentic reviews. Moreover, the dynamics of emotional cues and cognitive cues are salient among negative reviews.

Practical implications – This research provides implications to identify fake online reviews based on linguistic cues.

Originality/value – This research contributes to the literature by revealing the competition of mental resources between emotional and cognitive systems when deception is for harming others. Grounded in interpersonal deception theory, this paper investigates the interactive effect and complements the literature, which mainly used emotional cues and cognitive cues individually to detect fake reviews.