Digital Deception

I lie

Assignment 4

Apparently, I don’t mess around. At least, that’s what my diary results would suggest. According to my diary, I am really not one for the casual lie. While my lies were spontaneous, they had a higher level of severity than I would have expected (mostly in an attempt to protect another’s feelings; not malicious pre-conceived plots to mask my identity). Now, this finding may represent the methodological flaw we’ve addressed in class at length: it is not easy to remember your lies at the end of the day. Perhaps it is not that I only lie when it’s important but rather that I only remember it in those cases.

Furthermore, this study did not require us to write down specific lies. While there is space allotted for it on the Lie-D forms, the directions only recommend filling it in if the lie doesn’t readily match up to the categories provided. Frankly, in this situation I would not have been comfortable filling in my specific lies as they would most likely have identified me as the test subject, revealing not just my specific lies but my feelings on them. Nevertheless, without the specific lie documented next to my coding for it, I lost my ability to revisit my coding for things like severity etc after I’d gained the perspective of monitoring my lies for an entire weekend.

Prior to having been involved in the study, I would have said that what I remembered more than the severe lie itself would be the uneasiness that accompanied it. Interestingly, I did not feel heightened discomfort when lying, a finding inconsistent with DePaulo’s in her analysis of discomfort. In reviewing my coding, I think the reason I didn’t feel uneasy is because the lies I told were frequently other-oriented.

Another methodological issue was avoiding the documentation of lies in front of the person you lied to. Forrest, Feldman and Happ use a retroactive ID technique that would be more effective for identifying lies.

My personal diary experience was also inconsistent with the Feature-based model described by Hancock et al. According to the feature-based model, the more synchronous and distributed, but less recordable the medium, the more deception will occur. Hancock et al did not find that the feature- based model held in their diary study and neither did I in mine. Hancock et al found the highest frequency of lies occurred over the telephone. Perhaps it is merely that I do not talk on the phone terribly often, but I did not lie once over the phone during my diary study. In my limited sampling, face-to-face was the medium under which I lied most often.

Consistent with DePaulo’s findings, I, as a woman, told several other-oriented lies – more than I expected. Because the experiment was conducted over a weekend I didn’t get to test out DePaulo’s findings on intimacy.

My average lie count was right on-par with both DePaulo and Hancock’s findings, just above 2 per day.

posted by Erica @ 1:29 AM