Digital Deception

50% of the time I lie all the time

Well, this diary study has certainly proved to be interesting. It offered me a glimpse into my communication habits that I’ve never really had before. At the same time, it’s shown me just how many times I actually do lie (in exactly half of all my social interactions), and which media I lie the most in (FtF). However, I have to qualify these results by saying that this past weekend does not necessarily reflect my usual media habits. On both Friday and Saturday I had lengthy meetings and activities that boosted up my FtF frequency while limiting the time that I could spend communicating by other media. At the same time, my internet was out for a good part of Sunday morning. This is usually a time where I will delay the start of my homework by answering e-mails from the previous week or catching up with friends over IM. Instead, I just went back to bed (which in my opinion was also a very good choice). In all, I think both my IM use and electronic deception was lower than it would be on a standard weekend.

I wasn’t particularly surprised by the types of lies I told. Since the majority of the lies occurred in FtF interactions they tended to be either subtle lies or just exaggerations of stories or actions. However, I was surprised by how the lies made me feel. The small ones, I rarely felt worse after telling the lie than I did before or while telling it. Of course this changed depending on the size of the lie and who I was lying to. Still, it surprised me.

Overall, I think there are some major issues with the method itself. Specifically, it is really not suited to social FtF situations where one may interact with many people over a period of a few hours. My Friday night, for instance, consisted of a party where I interacted with 20-30 people for around five hours. It isn’t practical in that situation to carry the diaries around, so I had to do the best I could remembering who I talked to for any length of time, what stories I told, and how I responded to others. After five hours of many conversations, I’m sure I missed many lies and non-lie social interactions.

On a similar note, what about lengthy interactions which include multiple lies? On Saturday night I sat down with one of my best friends and we talked for 5 ½ hours straight (I know it sounds like a lot, but we actually did just sit on a couch and talk). In the conversation various small lies were told along with many truths. Yet according the diary study method this only counts as one social interaction. Which lie do I record? Since there were many more truths than lies in the conversation, shouldn’t it also somehow count towards a non-lie social interaction? This was the largest methodological problem I encountered in the study.

Probably because my media use was so irregular this weekend, I found that the Hancock et al. feature based model didn’t quite fit my pattern of lying. While I did lie the most (in terms of lies per social interaction) on the phone, it was followed by e-mail, then FtF and finally IM. Because of my media use, I think it is also important to note the frequency of lies in each of the media. While I told only had three interactions on the phone which involved lying, I had seven instances in FtF. In terms of lying frequency then, I pretty much followed the Media Richness Theory – FtF, phone, e-mail and then IM. Again, IM is last because I hardly used it as a communication medium this weekend.

Overall this study did open my eyes to the frequency in which deception entered my social interactions. I still wonder if certain situations like the ones I participated in this weekend aren’t more conducive to lying than other situations. After all, party stories and a long, lively conversation are almost always going to have some exaggeration and lies in them. I think it would be interesting on my part to run the study again on a more “normal” weekend (as if there is such a thing in college) of media usage.

posted by Barrett Amos @ 9:52 AM