#4 option 1: Digital Deception

When completing this assignment, I decided to tell one of my roommates a story about when I was traveling through Europe last semester. The first story I told her was in a face to face interaction over dinner about my experience traveling through Amsterdam. I thought that it would be much harder to lie when telling a story in person because my friends know me very well and are able to tell by my verbal and non-verbal tendencies whether I am lying or not. Face to face interactions are also synchronous so I wouldn’t have much time to think about what I was going to say, which makes lying much more difficult. The second story I told my friend was through Instant Messaging and I lied about visiting Budapest, (which I never ended up going to unfortunately). I thought that message based digital deception was much easier than face to face deception because the information was much easier to control via Instant Messaging since my friend was unable to see my non-verbal cues and I had time to think about exactly what I wanted to say. I believe that my experience relates most to the Social Distance Theory because I thought that lying (especially to a friend) is uncomfortable and it is much easier to lie through a socially distant medium. When I asked my friend which story she thought was a lie, she said that she thought I was telling the truth in the face to face interaction. When I asked her why, she said that my voice was steady, I didn’t say words like “um” a lot, it seemed like I knew what I was talking about, I seemed relaxed, and I maintained good eye contact. She also assumed that I was telling the truth and wouldn’t lie to her face. This confirms the idea of “truth bias”; that people assume one is telling the truth in a face to face interaction.