I came across a story in the news about an Internet relationship formed by an online predator.
Girl seduced by a web of lies
The article describes a man posing as a 17-year-old boy in an Internet chatroom. In reality, he is a 34-year-old married father of two children. This man attempted to seduce a 14-year-old girl over a three-month period through a complex sequence of lies. First, he pretended to be a 17-year-old boy called Jakson who had just moved into her town, and he began an intense online relationship with her. He then switched into the role of "Lorenzo," Jakson’s friend. As Lorenzo, he blamed the girl for causing Jakson to lose his job. The man put psychological pressure on the girl by claiming that she would be responsible if Jakson tried to commit suicide. To remediate this situation, Lorenzo suggested that she sleep with Jakson’s "boss," allowing the man to meet this girl in person.
The man responsible for this ill-behavior used both identity-based and message-based deception. His identity-based lies are prominent – he posed as the 17-year-old Jakson, Lorenzo’s friend, and then Jakson’s boss. But he also employs message-based deception by saying Jakson lost his job. The identity-based lie makes it easy for him to cover up the message-based lie, and vice-versa. Since almost all interaction took place through text-based CMC, the cues are largely assessment signals. This makes it difficult for the girl to detect the lies.
Social distance theory would predict that it is harder to lie to someone who is physically closer to you. Since the man lied over Internet chat rather than FtF, his actions support social distance theory. Media richness theory predicts that lying (an equivocal task) tends to favor richer communication mediums. But since the man only lied in CMC, this situation offers evidence against media richness theory. Lastly, chatrooms are a synchronous, distributed, recordable medium. The feature-based model predicts that the synchronicity and distributed nature of this medium would be favorable for lying. This case supports the feature-based model despite being a recordable medium. Indeed, the man may not have been aware of the medium’s recordability – chat logs were later used as evidence against him in the courtroom trial.
Some of McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors are at work here. First, "gating" features are removed. Specifically, the man was much older and may have been unattractive, but the girl cannot glean this through online chat. Therefore, she is not instantly turned away from him. Second, the man exerts interactional control. He can dictate what parts of his character to reveal or withhold at certain moments. And he uses this to great effect when he takes on the role of three distinct characters. Third, this is a case of "connecting to similar others." The man initiated the interaction by saying that Jakson had recently moved into the area she lived in. This gives them some common ground (geographic location) to relate to. The presence of these relationship facilitation factors were enough to allow the man to manipulate girl’s psychology in the way he desired.
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This is a disturbing story but a common one I am sure. I like the fact that you brought in theories of deception and talked about theories of CMC relationships. Like you mentioned, I believe the "Law of Attraction" was particularly important in this situation. In real life, this 14 year old girl and 34 yr old married father have little in common. But by changing his age and geographic location it gave them a foundation to work from and build a relationship.
One aspect of online deception that I find interesting is the usage of multiple characters. Not only was he Jakson but he was Lorenzo as well, which added another level to the deceit.
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