Digital Deception

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

The Good
While I am inclined to say that for these many reasons, this study is flawed, I think it many ways it has been helpful; it would be way too easy to say this has no bearing on my life as a liar, especially as a way to distance myself from any unpleasant results. Going back and looking at all the little (and in one case, not-so-little) things I had said made me realize just how important it was to not always be able to tell the truth. We’d all be in deep trouble if we didn’t … or maybe we’d all be better off? I consider myself to be an honest person — and I don’t think this study changes that — but I found that I do a lot of subtle lying. I’ll address this more later, but seeing all the little lies I told certainly made me want to be more honest.

I learned a great deal from studying my own lies. For example, I found that my lies are very spontaneous! I basically never lied unless thought would get away with it or I didn’t care if I got caught. I never lied to a group, and I was very wary of being caught, which made me avoid recordable lies unless I knew they were essentially undetectable. I thought using comfort level measures was really smart, and it seemed to be an incredibly obvious factor in the reason I lied: to be more comfortable. I found I made fewer lies to family, but also many more subtle lies (mostly simplifications) to them. In general though, I had more subtle lies than anything else, which doesn’t surprise me considering I don’t really like to lie and this is probably some kind of cognitive dissonance effect (where I say to myself, “well, you didn’t really lie.”) I had more outright lies to people who I knew less well, and this was probably related to impression management.

The Bad
There were many problems, methodological and otherwise, with this study, which (as I discussed) is one of the reasons why I found this study’s results easy to ignore. The idea of carrying around something and writing down all my lies is one that was much easier to do in imagination than in reality. I either couldn’t remember to do it, or just found the idea totally impractical. There were many other problems as well. There’s no record-ability of many types of lies, so how can you be sure to remember them all? How accurate can you really be if you’re doing something from memory? How impartial can you be if you’re writing down lies you told, especially in the heat of the moment? And there’s certainly bias in looking at things after the fact … And sample size? My weekend was not a good sample of my general interaction scheme because of the things I did and people (or lack-thereof) I interacted with, which certainly biased my results.

I had many problems arise while filling out my surveys. For one, the relationship to target is inadequate because it doesn’t account for people you know who aren’t your acquaintances, or other strange variations. The questions ask you for your perception of many things when an outsider could find a fact much quicker: how long have you known your partner, how serious was the lie, etc… which is good for some questions but not all. How long know partner is misleading in terms of correlations (if any are used, that is), for example, I’ve known my Jeep’s mechanic for six months, but I’ve met him twice. Intimate doesn’t necessarily mean meaningful/superficial conversation, although I think this measure was okay.

Another problem was the idea of speaking to vs. heard or saw. What if someone was eavesdropping on my conversation in FTF, or reading my away message (an outright lie at one point). How many targets is this? How many partners?
Furthermore, how well I know an individual is one thing, but trying to apply that measure to a group is completely different. The measure fails in the group case I believe.

There are others, but I’ll spare us from rehashing our prior class discussions.


The Ugly (a.k.a. theory application)
I realized pretty quickly that neither Hancock et al. nor Media Richness theory applied to my results, although if anything, the latter was more appropriate for my results. The frequency of my lies was heavily skewed towards FTF and email, slightly moreso FTF though. I lied to any number of people (friends, family, strangers, etc…) whom I cared or did not care about managing my impression for. This is probably because of the small sample size of the data, but also because I think I feel comfortable lying (when I do decide to), since I try to make them airtight and as small as possible, so the medium I use isn’t necessarily an issue. Although, I will say I chose my media for a reason, and that I let my cell phone ring a bunch of times purely for that reason.

What’s more, I don’t really use the phone that often. I only call a few people on the phone, and the rest I talk to in FTF or in some form of CMC. Basically, this makes me biased against the Hancock model. Sorry Jeff.

posted by Josh P @ 11:45 AM