True friendship to me has always been defined as knowing someone else almost as well as you know yourself. To see if this idyllic version of friendship truly existed, i decided to try this assignment out on my best friend.
Before I delve into what took place this weekend, I want to give you guys some background, because as you know, the foundation of the story is everything. My best friend (Sonny) and I have known each other for years (since I was 12). We often refer to ourselves as twins, even though he's of a different ethnicity and more than a few years older than me. He somehow always knows what I'm thinking and feeling. Although we are close, we often don't get to talk as much due to the distance and the work that encompasses our lives.
In class, due to my last name, Catalina assigned me a rich medium for my lying to take place. I chose the telephone (although it was not exactly by choice since it was the richest medium available to me due to the fact Sonny lives in New Jersey). I decided to formulate my story beforehand, outlining a plausible story and writing a couple of options just in case Sonny decided to probe and figure out my lies. You might think that I went overboard, however, I am truly just that bad of a liar.
I called Sonny up on Saturday afternoon (our normal chatting time due to both of us having no prior commitments at that time). After the usual small talk, I dove into my lie. I decided to tell him about how I met my first boyfriend (he had always been curious, but I had never told him the truth). I made sure that the lie/story i was telling him took place before me and Sonny had ever met just so he wouldn't know right away that I was lying. I added in details (such as where we went sightseeing) and inserted a tone of nostalgia, accompanies with tons of mournful sighs etc. My outline was a great help since Sonny was so curious and was constantly asking me questions. More so, I have this habit of (when I'm lying) pausing and then going "Oooh, I totally forgot where I was going with that." It's my way of giving myself enough time to think a better lie. Since I had the outline, such pauses diminished.
I used the outline to help me form conventional signals that related to telling the truth (such as not having pauses mid-conversation, or talking too fast).
The next step was to tell him a traveling story that was actually true. I was somewhat stumped on what medium to actually choose since me and Sonny rarely talked on Facebook or even IM. I thought about e-mail, but decided that it was too impersonal for any type of story telling. I ended up writing a blog about my traveling experience to India when I was 14 and sent him the link. My reasoning behind this "random" way of expressing myself to him was that I didn't have time to tell the story again and again to all my friends so I chose a medium where they could all see it on their own time. And I could edit it whenever I wanted to. Again, I made sure that I included the same amount of details as I had before. It was much easier to formulate the story on the blog, although I don't know if i can attribute this to the medium or to the fact that it was a true story.
The next day, I told Sonny about this assignment, and asked him if he had any idea if either story was a lie. I was secretly rooting for him to get it right, since of course in my mind this would prove that our bond was stronger than the theories of deception. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Sonny got it wrong on both counts. He thought that the blog post was a lie, and the story I told him on the telephone the truth.
He thought my story on the telephone was the truth since when he poked and prodded at the story (not intentionally trying to find holes, but accomplishing that purpose anyway) I had answers ready. He also thought that since I had waited so long to tell him the story, that I wouldn't be so mean as to lie about it. On the other hand, he thought the blog post was a lie since he thought that I had written too many details. To him, that was automatically trying too hard and so therefore, had to be a lie. He also didn't rely buy my story for using the blog in the first place.
The Social Distance theory states that a person will lie the least in richer medium, the Media Richness theory states that a person will lie the least in a lean medium and the Feature based theory states that a person will lie the most on the phone, and least on e-mail. These theories somewhat do not apply to my situation since I was specifically given the medium where I had to lie. However, if we put aside the fact that I was given the medium in which to lie in, as shown by my experience above, it was much harder for me to formulate a lie on the phone (as shown by the amount of prep work that I had to go through). Since I had many more cues to cover up, I had to work twice at hard to make sure that all of them pointed to me telling the truth. My experience does not support any of the three theories, but neither does it disprove any of them.
Rather, my experience shows that the theories that people have come up with for digital deception do not take into account many things. For example, they don't consider people's backgrounds, or the idea that one can somewhat prepare in advance for a pre-meditated lie. It just shows how theories in social science exist because someone found another way of looking at the problem, and none are completely correct, nor are any of them completely wrong.
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2 comments:
Radhika, you did a great job in planning on how to go through with the assignment. I was surprised that Sonny could not detect your lie over the phone, especially since you two are such good friends. I would have thought that the greater amount of cues over the phone would have allowed him to see through your lie; perhaps your ability to pull off the lie is just a reflection of your thorough preparation. Indeed, I think I would also be more inclined to believe people over the phone than over CMC because, as you mentioned in your post, it is harder to tell a long, made-up story over the phone.
I also thought that it was interesting that Sonny thought that you were lying in your blog post because you wrote “too many details.” This seems to refute what we went over in lecture with detecting deception; theory would predict that in CMC, people would be less likely to be distracted by faulty cues. Instead, it seems that Sonny focused on a faulty cue online: your many “details.”
Interesting post! I found your experience to be unique to the rest of the blog posts. Although I somewhat agree that your experience didn't really support or negate any of the theories in class, I found that your post raised a good question. I question if your friend, Sonny, or anybody else are becoming intuitively aware that people are using mediated channels to lie, as suggested by the Social Distance Theory. Maybe Sonny just assumed that because you used a blog to describe your channel that it was a lie and that a richer medium meant sincerity and truth.
I’m not sure whether there are master liars that plan every aspect of their deception as you did before you used the phone but I found that intriguing as well. I question if a deceiver would use this method though because of the depth and planning that is involved. I would think that a liar would kind of “bounce” of the other person’s reactions much the way they do in a face-to-face situation.
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