Digital Deception

Assignment 4: Am I lying now? Now? Now...?

In theory, the diary study seems like the best possible way of studying peoples’ lying habits. But after participating in it over the weekend, I found a couple things very frustrating and limiting. Despite this, I can’t think of any better way of studying lying, but I think results from these studies should not be taken as completely factual or unbiased.

I personally had two major issues with this assignment – one a methodological problem, the other a simple problem of our specific assignment. First, I was continuously very conscious of this assignment, over the three day period. I think that having ‘deception’ on my mind was a serious bias to my social interactions, and I believe it may have restricted me from lying in certain situations. Obviously, the big question is whether this method is better, or whether it is better to try and remember lies from the past. I’m afraid, however, that either result set would be slightly skewed, given my personal experience, and given the findings from the Caspi paper which implied that people found it hard to remember their past lies.

My second issue was just that this assignment took place over the weekend, and personally, my social interactions over the weekend are very limited (most of the time being spent working, or with my boyfriend, or my roommates). I simply think that more people are encountered during the week, when I am attending classes and my job. Also, the people who I spend time with during the weekend I am very likely to be completely truthful with. I think that if this study had been extended to a week, the data would have averaged out better, but I think that because it was only over the weekend that my data was slightly limited.

I actually thought that I would lie more often than I actually recorded, given all of the statistics we had mentioned in class, from the Depaulo and Hancock papers. I believe that my results are partly due to the assignment being present in my thoughts, partly due to self-reporting errors, and largely due to the timeframe of the assignment. Also, I simply found it very hard to judge things that I have said myself. One consideration I’d suggest is slightly changing the diary study, to have people record their social interactions for a given amount of time, and then after a week instruct them to look back and try to remember which interactions may have included lying. I think that this might be more accurate, because they would be presented with a clear record of all of their social interactions, which would help them remember each specific interaction, but they would not have dealt with the bias of having deception “on the mind.”

posted by Kate Fenner @ 5:57 PM