I tell my boyfriend random stories about traveling with my family all the time. I get really animated and excited whenever I relay my crazy family's humorous expeditions. Sometimes I'm crippled with laughter and have to regain my composure while he looks on with a bemused expression. When I did this experiment with him in a rich medium, face to face, I wanted my stories to be genuine, but not rehearsed. I made up my lie on the spot, saying the words as quickly as they came into my head. Somehow, I devised a tale about a bat flying between my mother's legs on the boardwalk at Disney in Florida. When the story didn't seem to have a "grand finale" I elaborated to say that the bat followed us like a dog to the outdoor ice cream parlor and swooped under the umbrella at our table amidst screams and laughter from my family.
When I told Mike a true travel story about eating in a restaurant in Florida, where there was a fiasco with the bathroom, a waiter and alligator strips (no details necessary...), he immediately knew I was telling the truth. My mannerisms gave away the genuine style of my stories, although I had tried to imitate this presentation style in my lie story. Of course, when I asked Mike which one was true and which story was false, he picked the first one without hesitation as the lie. He told me that with the first story my details were sketchy and muddled (unlike normal), I didn't laugh nearly as much and the story was unrealistic and unbelievable. This first element of the experiment coincides with the hypothesis that deception detection is more accurate in a rich medium. Although, I do feel that Mike would not have questioned the authenticity of either story if I had not asked which one he thought was the lie (truth bias). Like the first hypothesis states, Mike was able to pick up on minor verbal and non-verbal cues that are lost in CmC, and he was able to give me direct feedback.
When I communicated with Mike via CMC, I was able to tailor my stories much more so that the lie sounded like a story I had told him previously with details altered. Because Mike was familiar with me and trusts me (for the most part), he was not more or less skeptical of the truth via CMC, so the truth bias had not decreased with the leaner medium. CMC also gave me more control to edit my remarks before sending to that I made sure I didn't make a mistake in contradicting myself. With CMC, Mike chose the wrong travel experience as the lie. He said it was a coin toss. This experience also coincides with the hypothesis that deception detection will be more accurate in a richer medium (hypothesis 1).
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3 comments:
Hey Caton,
I am a little confused to your post. Maybe I am just not reading it clearly, but did you do this experiment both face to face and CMC? It seems that you did, but I just wanted to be sure.
If you did do that, I think you were able to get a very unique perspective on this assignment, since you could compare the lies and truths told in both mediums, giving you a more comprehensive example of any of the theories.
You mention the hypothesis that helps with deception deduction but you didn't mention any of the theories that help with the deception itself.
For example, was it easier for you to lie face to face, or over CMC? Since you used both mediums, you could have produced evidence that supported one of the three theories (Social Distance, Feature-based, and Media Richness)
I think your analysis is superb! I really appreciate the fact that you chose someone who knows you very well- research shows that people are less likely to lie to someone who is close to them, which is mentioned in Hancock's paper on digital deception. I think this is an extremely important factor in Mike's ability to detect your lies in face to face;this case perfectly goes with the media richness hypothesis and that it is easier to detect deception in a richer media. It makes me wonder that if Mike had been less familiar with your mannerisms, would he have been able to detect the difference between the two stories as astutely?
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