When we received this assignment I wasn’t thrilled. I am an awful liar and people can always tell when I am lying. For this reason I will never attempt to play poker and I am pretty bad at MAFIA (the card game). So conducting my own deception experiment was a bit challenging at first. However, after I thought about deception and the different media in which one can lie in, I realized I might only be a terrible liar FtF because of the facial cues available to the impression developer and the quick thinking it involves to cover your lies. In FtF lying, I am too close to the impression developer. There is no distance, which makes me feel uncomfortable. So I decided to try my luck on the telephone. According, to the feature based approach, lying on the phone is optimal because it is synchronous, recordless, and distributed. I called my friend “Lola”, and told her that I had to cancel our dinner plans this weekend because I forgot that I was going home for Rosh Hashanah. I felt pretty confident with the lie, until she started questioning me. Apparently, I did not think through my lie all that well. I forgot that I usually wear a cross around my neck and I had told her that my parents were in a Europe for a couple of weeks. When Lola started questioning me about these inconsistencies in my story, I was unable to respond to her quick enough. There were a few awkward pauses in our phone conversation, along with “umm….well”. I tried to tell her that part of my family was Jewish and my parents were already back from Europe, but the tone of my voice and the slow speed at which I replied gave it all away. So I guess I am not a very good lier FtF or on the phone. However, I do feel that my lie could have worked and would have supported the feature based model. If only I had though out my lie better, or lied to a different friend, my lie would have passed. Even though, in this case, my lie failed, the phone did help me feel more comfortable in lying to my friend, and it allowed me to get feedback and adjust to the situation (although clearly not that well).
My second situation was conducted in a leaner media (e-mail). The feature based model claims that the least lies occur via e-mail because e-mail is recordable and asynchronous (no feedback to adjust to). In this case I was telling the truth to my friend. I told Lola that I have been to Thailand. To make sure she would believe me (after the terrible lie I had told her previously), I made sure to include details and personal experiences, since emotion is difficult to express in e-mail. I told her of the different cities I went to, but I also made sure to include particular events that I encountered. Unfortunately, Lola thought I was lying again! Apparently, this time I was trying to hard. Lola said I provided too much detail and though I just looked on Google to find the names of Thai cities.
In conclusion, I am a bad liar and should not attempt to deceit people, because I will be caught. But if I were a good liar (oxymoron), I would most likely follow the feature based approach.
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Hey Dina,
I don't think being a bad liar is necessarily a bad thing, I mean you can get away with a few more things more easily if you are, but nothing you can't get with the truth. Anyway, back to your post. I was wondering if you think that your lie would have worked if you had done it over an asynchronous medium, by allowing you to edit an email, maybe you may have picked up on some of the inconsistencies. Your experience showed that you felt more comfortable in a more distance medium where your impression cues would not be totally out in the open. I wonder if your friend would have picked up on the lie if you have covered all of your bases prior to the conversation. Very interesting post!
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