I chose to do the first option of this assignment. I decided to lie to a friend via phone and then tell the truth via instant messaging. I talked to one of my good friends, Amanda, and put her to the test. She knows me very well, but I still believed I could get my fake story past her. I used the rich media (telephone) first to tell a lie about a deep sea fishing trip I went on with a friend over the summer. I told her that we went out deep into the ocean where the waves were huge and that I caught a very large fish. In my story, I got to keep the fish, and when I got home I ate it. Lie accomplished.
To switch the conversation over to AIM, I said my phone was dying, and we continued our talk through instant messaging. I kept the topic on fishing and I told her another (but this time true) story. I told her of a time when my brother and I were fishing and we both caught very large fish and had to pry the hooks out of them with pliers. We put the fish back, because we fish for fun, not for keeps.
Later in the day, I talked to my friend again, and told her that one of the two stories that I told her was false. She immediately guessed that the first one was a lie. She said I sounded awkward while telling it, and paused and said “um” a lot. She also mentioned that the deep sea fishing story was very vague and when she asked about details, I gave her short, quick answers. She said that the second story was very believable, and I gave precise details (specific place, time, who I was with) to solidify that it was true. Also, I typed a lot before she could respond, so it was clear that I did not pause between thoughts.
The experiment I conducted with Amanda verifies the proposal of rich and lean media selection. Amanda caught me in my lie on the phone easier because I gave her more cues and clues to detect my lie. The awkward pauses and the many “um”s in the conversation were enough for her to tell. The leaner media (AIM) would have allowed for easier lying, because it is harder to pick up on cues that a story is false. Thus, if I choose to lie in the future, I will use lean media, because digital deception is so easy.
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3 comments:
Hi Ashley,
Your experiment and experience was very similar to mine. However, I wonder what would have happened if you told both a truth and a lie with the rich medium and a truth and a lie with a leaner medium. This would give you more accurate results to test the hypotheses against, since you were biasing your subject to choose the true story, since according to the theory, it is easier for people to lie (and get away with it) on IM (less cues, etc).
Hi, Ashley. Actually I had a similar experiment to yours. The difference was that I told fake story online and true story on the phone. I'm such a bad liar, so I did not make it. However, I agree with your point. I actually drew very similar conclusion at the end. When lying, people tend to stay vague, keep pausing and unconsciously or not, do not want to spend too much time on it. Therefore, rich media would be able to show many cues that this person is lying. As leaner the media gets, deceiver can focus his effort on lying and do not need to care about controlling cues that would hinder him from deceiving.
I like how you set up the transition between the telephone and instant message. It seemed natural and probably lessened your friend’s suspicions. I think part of the reason that you didn’t get away with lying to your friend was due to the presence of confounding variables in your interaction. According to Interpersonal Deception Theory, deception detection is affected by the characteristics of the deceiver and receiver and of their relationship, the aspects of the communication event, and the medium in which it takes place. When your friend recognized the differences in your speech when you lied compared to how you spoke normally, her knowledge of you and your close relationship probably played as much of a role in her deception detection as did the communication medium. It seems that overall, studies on deception detection in CMC have been inconclusive and have shown a number of variables to contribute to detection accuracy. The one exception is in the case of the highly motivated liar. Highly motivated liars seem to be able to utilize the advantages of CMC to avoid detection. So if you had chosen to lie to your friend on AIM, unless you were highly motivated to succeed, it may have been just as difficult as lying over the phone.
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