#4- The beauty of honesty

For this assignment, I chose the option of rating the accuracy of a friend’s profile. I asked one of my best friends to rate each aspect of his profile according to how truthful he thought it was, and then I myself evaluated the accuracy of his profile.

For the most part, my friend’s profile portrayed an accurate image of the kind of person he is. He was truthful with information such as his network, sex, and birthday. For Facebook, such information would be considered assessment signals, since the information is difficult to lie about. In a space like college Facebook, it is hard to lie about sex or birthday because people in the network are likely to know each other in real life.

My friend’s conventional signals, however, were somewhat mixed in their truthfulness. Conventional signals on Facebook include information such as activities, favorite movies, favorite TV shows, and anything written under the “About Me” section; these categories can all be easily manipulated or edited to convey a certain kind of personality. My friend believed that he represented himself accurately with his favorite TV shows, movies, and books, and I agreed with him. He liked everything that he listed under these categories, and he refrained from listing anything that he did not actually watch or read.

My friend did acknowledge that some aspects of his profile were misleading. For instance, for his activities, there were a couple of groups on campus he had listed that he was no longer a part of. He did not intend to be deceptive; he simply forgot to delete the activities from his profile when he quit the activities. In addition, his relationship status was deceptive since he was listed as “engaged,” even though he was not engaged to his girlfriend. The misleading relationship status was the result of a joke between him and his girlfriend.

Even with the “deceptive” elements of his profile, I do not think that my friend’s profile fits with the idea of self-presentation goals. His profile did have a couple of misleading elements that most people would not be able to detect, which relates to the idea of subtle deception strategy. However, the “deception” was either unintentional or simply meant as a joke. My friend did not frequently lie in his profile, which was the opposite of what self-presentation goals would predict. He also did not attempt to appear more attractive in his Facebook profile through lying; instead, he portrayed himself accurately.

The fact that my friend’s profile was on Facebook, as opposed to another networking site, may have played a factor in his truthfulness. Since he was in the Cornell network, the only people able to see his profile were other Cornellians. Thus, there was a good chance that he might know or eventually meet people who looked at his profile; these people would probably be able to detect if my friend had lied on his profile. They also would have been able to tell if my friend was trying to portray himself as more attractive than he actually was. On the other hand, if he had been on a different networking site where he was more anonymous, he might have tried to be more deceptive.

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