Assignment #4, opt.1: Truth or Lie?

This is probably my favorite blog thus far to write. How often do you get to lie to a friend and it be for educational purposes? For this experiment, I put my best friend Michelle up to the task. She knows me very well but she is very gullible at the same time, so I was dying to see which one would overcome the other. I began by using the rich media to discuss the 1st memory. I called her and struck up a conversation about my trip to Puerto Rico this summer, seeing as she just got back from her own vacation in England. I told her that I had gone bungee jumping and trash can sliding down the side of the mountains. I went on to describe my horse back riding experience and scuba diving on the south shore. Mind you these were all lies, as I did not one thing of resemblance. I spoke to her the next day and switched it over to the lean media. I signed onto AIM began a conversation about my road trip up to Cornell from Long Island, NY. I told Michelle about the long 4.5 hour ride and the interesting things I saw along the way: three car accidents, two motorcyclists arguing and cursing each other out on the road and a group of deer walking along the highway. Now you would wish this was all fabricated but it was actually true.

Then came the test. I met up with her later on that day and revealed my assignment and the part she played in it. I revealed that one of the two stories I told her was a lie and she was to figure out which one was not true. After careful thought she concluded that the story I told her over the telephone about my trip to Puerto Rico was false. I was shocked she actually got it because I’ve done all the things that I told her about before so it wasn’t like anything was unbelievable. Michelle stated that over the phone I paused a lot as if I was thinking about what to say next. I also didn’t get into much detail as I would normally. I brushed over everything with a "yea" or "uh huh". Online she felt that even if I had paused or been thinking she didn’t notice because the conversation just kept flowing. The tone of my voice apparently also changed slightly and to her it just seemed a little fishy as if I had been exaggerating.

This experiment clearly supported the idea of lean versus rich media selection. The rich media made it easier to detect my lie because she had more cues to work with. She didn’t have my physical body language but my wording and tone of voice was sufficient. The AIM conversation gave me a bigger amount of ambiguity, decreasing the chance of deception detection. This intentional control of information to create false beliefs is exactly what digital deception covers.

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