This weekend I spent a great deal of time with my friend Jessica. This allowed me to conduct an experiment to determine whether she could detect lies regarding my traveling memories in both rich and lean media. Here are my two encounters:
TRUTH in LEAN MEDIA
This morning I emailed (lean media) my friend Jessica to tell her about my weekend. I told her that on Saturday I went to Rochester to see a local band play at a venue. I told her about the car ride, the city of Rochester, the musicians and the great restaurants we ate at. I described in great depth the outfits the performers wore and my thoughts and feelings throughout the trip. In addition to giving a very detailed account of the events, I also used emoticons, exclamation points and larger sized fonts to better convey my emotions.
LIE in RICH MEDIA
On Sunday I ran into Jessica on the street (face to face interaction), by College Town Bagels. She asked me what I had done the previous night. Instead of telling her the truth (I stayed in and went to sleep early), I explained that I had gone to a friend’s house, watched several movies and hung out on the porch until the morning. I decided to lie because I wanted her to think I had an exciting, eventful and memorable time and not a ordinary and dull one. Because I was telling a lie, my facial expressions and hand gestures were not spontaneous but instead were forced.
Today, I spoke to Jessica and explained to her my experiment. She told me that she believed my story about my trip to Rochester but had doubts about the story I had told her on Sunday. When I informed her that I had lied, she responded that she had noticed something strange in my behavior when I was narrating my story. This supports the Media Richness Theory, which states that we are more likely to lie face to face (rich media) than we are via email (lean media).
To accomplish lying and make my story sound plausible, I tried to make lots of hand gestures and eye contact. Also I chose my words very carefully and diverted the attention off of me several times by asking her questions about her weekend. The media negatively affected my strategy because I lacked a buffer between Jessica and I and felt extremely exposed. This supports the Social Distance Theory which states that lying is uncomfortable and that we use the most “social distant” media to do it.
Jessica told me she was able to detected my lying during our face to face interaction. She relied on the usual cues. She stated that my eye contact seemed too excessive as well as my hand gestures and that my refusal to discuss my weekend made her even more suspicious. Further, Jessica revealed that I took long pauses between my sentences, giving the impression that I was carefully selecting my choice of words. This is something I didn’t know I was doing. Deception detection is more accurate in face to face interactions (rich media) because there are more cues (my hand gestures and facial expressions) and chances for feedback than in a lean media interaction (i.e. email) which can help uncover lies. Also, in CMC, liars can take more time to rehearse lies because of the asynchronous nature of the environment (i.e. time is expected to elapse in between email responses).
In conclusion, I communicated to my friend Jessica two traveling memories: a true one in a lean media (email), and a lie in a rich media (face to face). My lie was noticed right away. What gave it away were my facial expressions, hand gestures, delays in between responses and unnecessary eye contact. All these factors contributed to Jessica’s deception detection.
COMMENTS:
http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-4option-2-my-best-friend.html
http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-cancun-or-bahamas.html
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2 comments:
Interesting post. At first, I would have guessed that your friend would suspect the Rochester trip story to be fictitious, if only because your true lie, about hanging out and watching movies with a friend seems so mundane and trivial. Your experience lends support to our first hypothesis about deception detection in FtF interactions versus CMC, which is that we can better detect lies in FtF because of the relative abundance and breadth of cues and feedback available as well as its completely synchronous nature. Your friend caught on because of your unusual behavior; suspicious eye contact, gestures and variation in your talking style. Of course, none of these cues would be present and/or relevant in a CMC environment, so I’m led to wonder if your friend would have identified your lie as easily if the mediums had been switched for the two stories.
Nice post. I like how you integrated both the Social Distance Theory and the Media Richness Theory into your face-to-face encounter. It's interesting how your "excessive" cues are what gave you away. You were trying so hard to seem believable that your friend knew something must be up. I feel this is the situation is most cases, if you are lying during ftf you try hard to eliminate the cues taht would give you away as lying (i.e. reduced eye contact, stuttering...). But in this case, as I'm sure in many other cases, it back-fired.
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