Digital Deception

Assignment #4

When I looked over the diary entries today, I realized that I lied a lot less that I thought I would have. I was not really surprised by the lies that I did tell, because they were very minimal. Since the lies were pretty minimal, I didn’t feel any twinge of regret for telling them. This weekend was a little unusual, though, because I was sick and did not interact with as many people as I would have normally. I think that if I continued to do the study that I would find that I lie a lot more. My lies were also almost completely self-oriented, which is unusual because the DePaulo study predicted that women would tell more other-oriented lies. I usually do tell a lot of other-oriented lies, but for some reason I just did not have to this weekend. Most of my lies were socially distant, for example over the phone or through email. This was due more to the fact that I was not able to speak to the people face to face, rather than because I felt more comfortable lying over those mediums.

Some of the methodological issues are of course that not everyone remembers the lies that they tell. This could be because we choose not to remember them or we simply just forget to write them down. I found it a little difficult to record some of the social interactions involving more than one person. In some cases, I knew one person very well and the other not so well, but there was only a likert scale for one person. This was also an issue for rating how much you liked your interaction partner. If there are three interaction partners and you only like one of them, how do you rank that? This could be problematic when you are in a group of two or more people. Another problem I think, with this class study, is that we recorded our lies over the weekend. I personally think that I may lie more during the week because I interact with more people that I do not know as well. Over the weekend, I may see less people, and not feel the need to lie to the people I know very well.

I think that the Hancock et al. feature based model is still the best to use when studying lies and deception. There are always going to be situations that do not fit the model, but it comprehensively covers most deception situations. The only thing I noticed is with recordability and lying over email. When I am telling a small lie over email, I do not really care that it is recorded, because it is something that can never be detected by the other person. If I told that same lie face to face, the person would probably be more likely to detect the lie.

posted by Nicole @ 3:38 PM