I used face to face interaction to lie to my friend about a summer traveling trip and instant messaging to tell her a truthful summer travel. Since I knew I would have to focus on nonverbal and physiological cues, I tried to prepare myself by forming a rough outline of what I would describe and I also made sure that the lengths of the stories were about equal so she wouldn’t suspect anything. However, these preparations did not help because my friend was still able to discern that the lie was told ftf. I was slightly disappointed because I thought I can usually get away with lies.
The synchronicity definitely played a huge part in her detection because as I was telling the story, I was overly aware of my gestures, tone, eye-contact, and her reaction to my lie. I had to observe how she perceived the story and be prepared to make changes to sway her into believing it. I thought maybe there were too many physiological cues that gave my story away so I tried the same experiment on another friend, but I used the phone as the rich media. Thus, by focusing on fewer cues, I would surely be able to fool her. However, that was not the case either because she detected that the lie was told over the phone.
As described in the Social Distance Theory, lying to my friends was very uncomfortable for me and when I discussed their opinions on the issue, they both seemed to think that it would be easier to lie in CMC because there wouldn’t be an issue of confrontation or nonverbal and physiological cues (gaze, eye-contact, etc.). This contrasts from the Media Richness Theory which says that a rich media would be chosen for more equivocal and complex communications to receive immediate feedback and have more control. In my experiment, it seems that I had less control because there were too many cues that distracted me.
In addition, other factors, like people lying differently to different types of people, played a role in how my friends were able to decipher which story was a lie. Since I am close to these friends, I rarely lie to them so they could tell I was lying because they noticed that I sounded more stiff and hesitant than usual. I also don’t think I was successful because of the higher levels of cue multiplicity from the rich media. This decreased the levels of reprocessability, causing me to focus less on the deception. I believe I would have had more potential in deception had the lie been told in an ongoing conversation and had I been talking to more casual friends/acquaintances.
3 comments:
Sara-
I would have to agree that I too have a hard time lying to people, especially close friends, face to face. Your experiment has provided great support for the Social Distance Theory that states that people prefer the most “socially distant” media (such as email or instant messaging) to deceive others when lying is uncomfortable. Thus, the richer the media, the harder time people have deceiving others because of the display of “faulty” nonverbal cues that people use to detect lies (i.e. smiling, increase speech rate). Additionally, I found it very interesting that your friend was able to detect a lie through a leaner media, the telephone. Maybe your friends know you too well or lying is not your expertise.
The only solution I can think of is that both experiments’ outcomes may not be completely accurate as you had full intention of deceiving your friends from the beginning. Like you said, in this experience you were much more aware of your nonverbal and physiological cues compared to your possible day-to-day deception. Also, the severity of your deception plays a role in how well you are able to successfully deceive others. The more severe the lie, the harder it is to pull off in a face to face interaction (Social Distance Theory, again).
You accurately labeled your deception as an example of the Social Distance Theory. Because lying is uncomfortable, deception will be more predominant in a leaner, more socially distant medium like Facebook. I think you made a brave choice in choosing to tell your untruthful travel story in the rich face-to-face medium. According to SDT, these lies were going to be more difficult for you than if you had chosen to lie about a summer traveling trip over instant messaging. In addition, I believe that you made a very interesting claim about how deception detection differs in terms of who you are lying to. If two people are close, each will have a much deeper knowledge about the other that will enable enhanced abilities to detect lying. When speaking with a friend as opposed to a stranger, there is never any question over identity-based deception. All of your friend’s attention can therefore go into determining the validity of your message-based conversation. In turn, this can make deceiving a friend much more difficult than a stranger, which is the situation that you experienced.
Sara
As soon as I read your first paragraph I immediately thought something important about this assignment. First, as I mentioned somewhere else, I feel that a lot what goes into whether a lie is successful or not is how much you want to get the lie across and when I was going to tell my lie, I wasn't as enthusiastic as I should have been when I went about it, so I chose to use a leaner medium.
Now obviously I can't tell whether you wanted to get your lie across, but I feel that for the context of this assignment, a lot of the lying that's going on is quite forced. In my opinion, that will probably lead to a lower success rate. On the other hand, if we really did have to get these lies across (like if we really depended on it), then we probably would have put a lot more effort into it and had more success.
Then as I read on in your post, it seems that the reason for your failure was your lack of confidence and familiarity with the situation. It seems that body language really does count for something when we lie, but I think that when we try to isolate exactly what it is, that's when we develop this idea that our cues are faulty. But when you're lying in the real world, all those cues are synchronized, so it really is possible to detect lies. I think that if you were to lie about some other kind of experience that you were really dependent on, then you would probably have done a better job. So don't get discouraged!
ashish
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