Digital Deception

Assignment 8

Reality Monitoring deals with memory characteristics of perceived (actually experienced) and imagined events. The main idea behind reality monitoring is that memories based on real experiences differ from memories based on fiction. For this assignment, I looked at my 22 year old friend's blogspot, and chose one of the stories to monitor.

The story is about how my friend got the chance to interview Michelle Monaghan, an actress from MI3, at her spring internship in Sydney. In the blog, it says that her manager had training on Monday, so she asked her to do the interview. She recently saw a movie with the actress in it, which she says is now one of her favorite movies, and she agreed to do the interview. She then goes on to mention that she is really excited about interviewing an internationally known superstar who has been in movies with Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie. She then goes on to talk about the interview, and about how the actress was so pretty and thin in real life. The interview went really well and she was able to ge a picture with the actress.

In order to determine the reality of this story, it is important to see how much perceptual, contextual, and affective information is in the story. Perceptual information contains visual details, sounds, smells, tastes, and physical sensations; Contextual information contains details about where and when the event took place; and Affective information contains details about how someone felt during the event. Statements about actually experienced events included more perceptual information, more spatial information, and more temporal information than statements about imagined events.

After learning all of the criteria for reality monitoring, I determined that my friend's story was entirely truthful. She used a lot of perceptual information, specifically about how she felt when she was asked to do the interview, and how she physically felt before and after the interview took place. There was a lack of contextual information about where the event took place, but since she had an internship in Sydney, it was understood that it took place at her workplace there. If this story took place in another frame of reference, it might not have been as believable. She included a lot of affective information about how she felt in the story. She used a lot of exclamations and capitalized words which really showed her excitement. There were also somexpletiveses in there that made her emotion even more convincing.

Overall, I think that Vrij's approach of Reality Monitoring worked very well in the case of analyzing a story in a blog. I feel that my ability to detect deception has grown, and that the next time I hear a story, or read one, I will know what to look for in order to determine how truthful it really is.

posted by Nicole @ 6:26 PM