I decided to conduct this experiment on my housemate Andy. I figured he would be a good subject because we are friends but he doesn’t know much about my past before I got to Cornell, ensuring that he wouldn’t be able to discount my lie based on knowledge of my past. I chose to tell him the false travel story face to face. My choice was supported by the Media Richness Theory, which states that a person will choose a rich media for more equivocal tasks and a lean media for less equivocal tasks. Since I was going to be telling him an ambiguous story with the intent to be deceptive, my communication was highly equivocal, therefore appropriating a rich media such as face to face. Since I was going to be deceptive, I wanted the ability to see his reactions to my story and adjust accordingly to make it more believable. While telling him the false story about the time I went to Spain with my family I took advantage of the ability to do so, changing the direction of the story when I saw he was beginning to doubt the truth of my statements. For example, I started to tell him that my family participated in a running of the bulls and when I saw from his reaction that he didn’t believe this at all I began to talk about the food we had there, getting away from the risky detection topic.
I chose to tell him the true story using Instant Messenger, a lean media. The Media Richness Theory would support this choice to use a leaner media for a less equivocal task, such as telling a true story about a travel experience. I told Andy about my trip to Europe two summers ago and how I visited Paris and London. He seemed very interested and overall the conversation went well.
After I had told him both stories, I asked him if he could tell in which one I was lying. To my surprise, he got it right. He correctly predicted that I was lying in person and telling the truth on Instant Messenger. I thought that the Social Distance Theory would have cause him to think I was lying on IM since it states that people are uncomfortable lying and choose to distance themselves through leaner media. However, he believed what I said on IM and not in person. When I asked him how he knew I was lying in person, he stated that I was rocking back and forth when I was telling the story and not really maintaining eye contact. He also stated that my statement about the running of the bulls was too unbelievable and over the top.
His detection is supported by the hypothesis we spoke about in class that detection is more accurate in face to face communication. The first part of the hypothesis states that there are many more cues and feedback in face to face communication as compared to leaner media. One of the reasons Andy detected my lie was due to my nonverbal cues (nervous rocking and lack of eye contact). These cues would not have been available in other media. The last part of the hypothesis states that lies in CMC can take more time and are editable. Due to the fact that I was coming up with the story on the spot, I made up the eccentric tale of running with the bulls. If I had been in a CMC communication, I would have had more time to simulate my story and be sure to not send a comment such as the above.
http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-4-1-lies-and-deceptions.html
http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-lies-and-truths-of-travel.html
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3 comments:
FtF does let you adjust to the reactions of the other person, but your experiment suggests that this advantage may not be enough to justify a FtF conversation when lying. Once you have made a mistake worthy of inducing doubt into the deception receiver, adjusting your strategy may not reverse the effect. In your case, this happened when you told the bull anecdote. Despite switching topics after observing his reaction, he still pointed out the bull story when asked how he could tell you were lying.
In FtF, the receiver is allowed to observe all of the liar’s nonverbal cues – which your friend used to detect your lie. But this disadvantage is exacerbated when you take into account the fact that the liar must devote cognitive resources to creating the lie and observing the receiver’s cues (as per the hyperpersonal model). This leaves even fewer cognitive resources available for managing your own cues than normal, making it extremely difficult to do well.
I am impressed your friend detected your lie. Since he stated social cues were his basis for lie detection, maybe it is possible the running with the bulls comment was a giveaway. An experience such as that would typically be stated boldly with pride and the nervous rocking/lack of eye contact in such a case could have been instrumental in the failure of the lie. However, it would be interesting to see if you repeated those social cues in a case where you were actually telling to truth to see if your choice of words had an impact or if he was relying completely on social cues, which as in class were discussed to be fairly poor methods of lie detection.
It is very difficult to control your own body language if you have not played out the lie scenario in your mind at least once. I agree it is easier to lie in CMC communication where there is more time to configure responses, but like you stated Media Richness Theory leads us to believe we can be more ambiguous and deceptive in FtF. However, a lie might be more expected in FtF because of the online truth bias. Even though you obviously know the person you were lying to already, the truth bias applies because you would seemingly have no reason to lie to a friend via Instant Messenger about a random memory.
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