I decided to tell a friend a lie about a traveling experience in rich media and the truth about a traveling experience in lean media. I wanted the lie to contradict the actual truth, so I lied about my travel during one specific time period. This way, there was a contradiction within my two conversations with the same person, so it would then be obvious I lied in at least one of the conversations. I told my friend, face-to-face, about a trip I made to the Bahamas my spring break of my senior year in high school, which is the lie. Then on AIM, later that day, I recalled my trip to Cancun during spring break of my senior year in high school. Clearly I could not have gone on both trips, so my friend pointed out the contradiction prompting me to ask, “In which conversation do you think I was telling the truth, and in which do you think I was lying?”
My friend immediately responded on AIM that he thought I was lying about going to the Bahamas. His reasoning did not have much to do with the social cues of our conversation, but rather his personal encounters with spring-breakers. He told me he knows that a lot of high-school kids go to Bahamas for spring-break, where spring-break in Cancun conjures up images of college-kids on MTV spring-break shows. So, he thought I went to the Bahamas and not Cancun, which is the opposite of what I actually did.
Just as the study on online dating predicted, I lied about a fact/achievement in ftf communication. This is consistent with the Media Richness Theory. I wanted to be ambiguous in my lie, and lies by nature are ambiguous, so I used the richest media, face-to-face. I thought my facial expressions and tone of voice could help me convince my friend I was telling the truth. I also gave many details of the fake trip. Face-to-face is recordless and synchronous which are two features that made telling a lie mentally easier. I told the truth over IM, and Media Richness theory predicts there would be less lies told over IM since it is normally used for unambiguous messages. I tried to use this idea to my advantage by telling the truth, and attempting to make it seem like a lie by taking a lot of time between sending messages to create the idea that I was taking time to think of how to phrase my lies.
While Media Richness Theory guided my decision over which media to tell a lie in and which to tell the truth, Social Distance theory may have played a role in my friend’s guess over in which conversation I was lying. My friend knew that I lied in one situation and Social Distance theory would predict it was in a mediated conversation because there is a greater distance and time to formulate lies and responses. Face-to-face could be more difficult to tell lies in because it is more-fast pace and there are so many more social cues. My friend perhaps did not pick up any obvious social cues in our face-to-face chat leading him to believe I lied in the Instant Messaging chat where I would have more time to create a false story, which was not the case.
My Comments:
Comm 245 Blue: Assignment 4 Option 1
Comm 245 Blue: 4.2 Not Too Far Off
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3 comments:
It is interesting about how your friend came to the conclusion about how you were lying about the trip to the Bahamas when it was really the Cancun trip you were lying about. I know he used deductive reasoning to figure out the one in which he thought you were lying, but do you think there are underlying concepts in the instant message that truly guided his decision? (i.e. reduction in truth bias, harder to get your point across etc.)
You said you were able to use facial cues and change your tone of voice in FtF contact. With instant messaging you cannot do that. While the trip may seem fantastic in FtF the limited cues in instant messaging can make even the most entertaining vacation dull (this might have lead him to believe you were lying about this one since the one you described in FtF was so detailed). The reduction in the truth bias could also have led your friend to believe you were lying. He could not see you throughout the whole conversation and the apparent instinct to trust you might have declined.
I know he is your friend, but he might have started to question your vacation just because he is more apt to “take everything with salt” just because instant messaging is a leaner media.
Dan,
This is such an interesting experiment you conducted. It seems like such an easy idea to trick one of your friends, and it gave you so much information to work with concerning deception. I really like that you included the idea behind the Social Distance Theory and how since it is easier to lie when you are have the time to think about how to edit your conversation in a certain way, your friend assumed that you were lying. I like that you contradicted this with the idea that since AIM is recordable and therefore traceable, it is harder to tell a lie. In face to face such as you had, only you and your friend were present, so no matter how many times you argue that you were telling the truth, he has no possible way to prove you wrong or even confirm to others that you lied in the first place!
Since people tend to think that face to face interation makes it harder to lie, it was nice to see that in your experiment, it actually is sort of easy to lie to someone's face when you are aware of the non-verbal clues that you should avoid!
Hey!!
This was such a great post! I really like how you fooled your friend by narrating the same story and altering one small fact.
What I think made your experiment so interesting is that you brought to surface something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The combination of cues (facial expressions, hand gestures) and what we know. Your friend stated that you went to the Bahamas instead of Cancun based on his knowledge of spring break trips in high school.
But what if the two contradict. Which one plays a bigger role? If in a face to face conversation, you noticed I had a strong French accent but told you that I was born and raised in the United States and didn’t give away any suspicious cues (i.e.: lack of eye contact), would you believe me? Or what if I told you I spoke in French and demonstrated my knowledge but talked really fast and looked extremely nervous, would you believe me?
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