We all know that lying is pervasive in our daily lives, with research showing that each of us tells 1-2 lies a day. This is why I chose to investigate the first assignment option this week because it’d give me the chance to see how successful I really was at online deception.
To start the assignment I thought back to fall break of last year in when my best friend and I went home and went around upstate New York on a few little road trips. I thought this would be the best trip to use for this assignment because there were a lot of stories involved and it was almost a year ago at this point. I began with talking with my friend, who I’ll just refer to as John to keep him anonymous, at dinner on Thursday about how last year’s fall break was a lot of fun. We started reminiscing about where we went and some of the funnier moments of the weekend like when we went on the bumper cars and were attacked by 12 year olds and when a six year old hit me at the baseball hall of fame.
Since all of these events really happened over fall break the conversation flowed really easily and we were able to give each other many cues about how we felt about the issues by smiling, nodding, and laughing.
Then, on Sunday night I was talking with John on AIM and as we were catching up on our weekends (because I had been away) I knew that I had to finish up the assignment and somehow pull off a lie during our conversation. Since we were in an online space I had many more cognitive resources available to me as the hyperpersonal model suggests. This allowed me to think a lot before I even messaged John about my weekend about how I would tell the lie.
I was trying to decide which form of communication would best be suited to pull off my lie and I eventually decided to use AIM because it has many features that would potentially benefit me in my deception. As the featured based model presented by Hancock and his colleagues states, instant messaging is nearly synchronous, is not always recordable, and is distributed. These three features of the technology make it very conducive to deception.
Also, according to the hyperpersonal model, in an online space I am able to selectively represent myself or ideas. I found myself planning what I’d say before I even began talking with John. I started talking to him and told him how I got lost on my way back this weekend (which was my first lie of the night) and I continued to lie and tell him how it reminded me of how we got really lost on the way home from the baseball hall of fame in Cooperstown.
At first John questioned my story and said he couldn’t really remember that. But I was ready for this questioning, again due to my preparation, the fact that I was only in a slightly synchronous space, and because I had more cognitive availabilities. I told John how we saw the sign for the highway, but it was at a really odd intersection and we weren’t sure which road we should take, that we decided to go to the left and ended up down a really long and lonely back country road and were driving around for about 20 minutes. John started saying “lol” and that he couldn’t believe he could forget something like that and he played it off because he said that he gets lost a lot when he’s driving and he must have just forgotten about that time.
I decided it was time to come clean and let him on the little experiment and told him it was all a lie and that I was doing it for this class. John acted pretty surprised and he claimed that he couldn’t tell that I was lying because I seemed really convinced that it happened and that I had a whole story to go along with it. He added that he thinks he can tell if I were to lie to him in person though because he claims I have the tendency to get really read and look down if I’m lying to him. I guess that part of the experiment will have to wait until another time.
Links to commetns:
http://comm245green.blogspot.com/2007/09/yo-brahh-on-your-profile-you-forgot-to.html
http://comm245green.blogspot.com/2007/09/a4o1-thanks-comm-245-for-forcing-me-to.html
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