Digital Deception
Assignment 3: Lie to my face...or my computer?In the age of Facebook, MySpace and Friendster, we frequently meet other people online. Computer mediated communication greatly changes the process of impression formation. For one thing, it eradicates any nonverbal cues that we might otherwise rely on to get a feel for another person. As we discussed in class, body language, eye movements, gestures, hand motions, fidgeting, etc. are not available in online conversations. Add to this that we lose the tone and inflection given to comments when spoken, and we are left to rely almost entirely on linguistic features.
Carlson cites research which found that linguistic features affect speaker credibility and can serve as valid indicators of deception. Deceivers in CMC frequently use past tense verbs, qualifiers, indefinite pronouns, absence of pronouns, and verbal hedges. As for the specific message content, Carlson says that there a several things that impact its manipulation, specifically the way that the CMC context influences the deceiver’s ability to plan a message and recall prior interactions.
But what if there were no past interactions? And what if this conversation were not a premeditated attempt to con another individual, but instead an innocent first conversation between two people who had just met online?
I plan to study spontaneous deception in an online forum. Specifically, I want to look at the difference in the type and frequency of spontaneous lies between initial interactions face-to-face and initial interactions online.
DePaulo describes a taxonomy of lies in her article. She breaks lying down into the categories, feelings, achievements, actions and plans, explanations and facts. Obviously, it would be easier to lie about certain physical attributes in CMC than it would be face-to-face – it would be hard to lie about gender or physique in person than over the internet. For other types of lies, however, I’d be curious to see if similar medium-based trends exist.
posted by Erica @ 10:41 PM
1 Comments:
Erica – I think your idea of spontaneous lying is really interesting. I’m a bit unsure as to what you are going to do, but I think you are just going to have two people talk, without any prior expectations or information, and see what happens. If that’s what you are going to do, I think that’s really interesting, because it is very different from studying lies that occur when there is some prior knowledge or expectation. Will there be a goal, or a point, to each conversation, beyond just “having a conversation”? I think this seems like a good way at trying to get at exactly what is lied about over CMC as opposed to FTF. I do agree with Nikki in that most lies that people tell are not premeditated, and I think it’s important to make that distinction clear: I think you are trying to tell the difference between conversations with any previous knowledge, and spontaneous conversations with someone completely unknown. I am interested to hear more about your method for conducting this study!
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