Digital Deception

Shades of Gray

Option 3

I chose to do the third option for this week’s assignment because I am a member of a group listserv here on campus that we lovingly refer to as “spam-l” for its utterly useless content. The listserv was created for the purpose of moving our discussion of mundane topics, pointless debates, internet oddities, personal stories, and funny pictures away from our main “events-l” listserv. Well, the idea worked and in the year and I half that I have been a member of the listserv it has received just over 11,000 e-mails (and that from a group of around 50 members). Like I said, spam-l is often the venue for an elaborate story whose veracity is always in question. The perfect subject for a reality monitoring analysis.

The story I chose was written by a friend this past summer while he was interning in Boston this past summer. Apparently engineering interns don’t have enough work to do, because he would send a fairly elaborate story detailing his escapades to the listserv at least once a week. In this particular story he talked about a girl he met while in Boston who is also an engineer and goes to Cornell. He described how they met at the internship, the interests they had in common, how they hit it off and went on a few “dates,” how she told him two weeks later that she had a boyfriend, and how they continued to remain friends and hang out. Keep in mind that this story is spread out over a 3-4 page e-mail filled with elaborate descriptions, (probably) embellished story telling and the general good sense of humor I can expect from my friend. He was writing to entertain all of us, even while keeping us updated with the events in his life. But was he telling the truth? That is for reality monitoring to decide.

Reality monitoring lays out eight criteria on which to judge a story or statement: 1) clarity; 2) perceptual information; 3) spatial information; 4) temporal information; 5) affect; 6) reconstructability of the story; 7) realism; and 8) cognitive operations. The story my friend told is most definitely clear, vivid, and lively. Of course, this could be because he wrote up his memory as a story, embellishing certain parts and emphasizing others in an effort to entertain us, the readers. Since the story describes his interactions with the girl he had just met and was getting along well with, it is full of perceptual information. Although lacking in physical sensations, he more than makes up for it with visual details and descriptions of what they did and saw (i.e. the color of the theater they walked into, the pleasantness of the food at dinner, etc). Likewise, it is all presented in an ordered, temporal format in which the chronological order is precisely described and followed. The story also is very affective, as he describes how each action the two take together make him feel (i.e. “it made me happy…”, “I was crushed…”, “we had an awkward tension between us that I was enjoying…”, etc). Comparable to the temporal situation, the story was also perfectly reconstructable. It was told in a temporal order and filled in with many, many details – much more than we would ever need to just get the point of the story. Similarly, the story is quite believable. It is exactly the kind of situation I have seen my friend in before, and he behaved in similar manners. It is consistent with what I know to be his manner and reality. Finally, the story also had a number of cognitive operations (i.e. “it suddenly occurred to me that we might not be on the same page…” or “I interpret it as a ‘gosh, I kinda like you’ smile”). So his story more than meets all eight criteria of Sporer’s Reality Monitoring criteria – the seven “truth criteria” and the one “lie criteria.” Does it make the story true?

Personally, I believe the basis of the story. I believe my friend did meet this girl, that they hit it off for a couple of weeks before she told him that she had a boyfriend, and that they continued to hang out for the rest of the summer. However, I also believe that my friend was writing a story to entertain all of us, and as such, all of the facts may not be entirely true or may be embellished. Since e-mail is a very composable medium, he certainly had the time to plan, write, and edit the story before sending it out to the listserv. It’s not like he seemed to be doing much work at the internship after all. In my mind, there were just too many unnecessary details (which Vrij talked about as potentially signaling a false statement), which, while embellishing the story, added little to the factual information. Overall, everything just seemed very neat, packaged, predictable, and fantastic in the way he told the story for it to be all genuine. But reality monitoring signaled that story was, in essence, bona fide thing. So I went and asked my friend how much was actually true.

At first he protested my questions, saying that of course it was all true and how could I accuse him of sending something false or embellished out to spam-l. We both burst out laughing and he admitted that while the basis of the story was legitimate, he made up a number of things and embellished many others. What does this say about reality monitoring? Seemingly, it can’t distinguish between shades of truth where the story is essentially true but where many of the details are not. Is there any way, between reality monitoring and CBCA, that such shades could be detected and the overall veracity verified? This could be an interesting topic in which further analysis would be necessary. Honors thesis anyone?

posted by Barrett Amos @ 8:17 AM