I consider myself a pretty good liar. To me, a good lie is like winning a game of rock paper scissors. I honestly believe that there is a substantial amount of skill in RPS, and when I lose I don’t fee like I lost a coin flip, I feel like I was mentally dominated. Crafting a good lie is the same way; you have to know your target and carefully choose the words that will give you the best chance to achieve deception. In this case, I was not looking for just the best words, but rather the best medium that was conducive to slipping a lie past my best friend. It is not enough to simply make the two stories equal in my targets perception of truthfulness. In that case he would have a 50% chance of choosing the lie. In order to execute a good fib, I have to intentionally mislead my friend into choosing the real story.
I told my lie about taking a road trip to New York to see a Yankees-Blue Jays game. This was easy to talk about because in fact I did take a road trip with friends from home, but we went to Toronto and not New York. I chose to use the phone during my lie. My choice could aptly be explained using Media Richness Theory. Lying is an ambiguous and an equivocal task-therefore I chose to lie using the richest media possible. The more cues and the richer my media during the exchange that I had with my friend would give me the most opportunities to tell a convincing lie. I could use both details and tone of voice in my effort of deception rather than rely on my friend to take me at my word in a text message. I then went online and had an instant message conversation with my friend, who just happened to be in the room next door. I talked about how I had gone to Wales and turned 18 on the plane to visit my sister who was abroad. I chose this vacation story because it seemed pretty outlandish and perhaps could cause my friend to be persuaded to choose that one as a lie. I still told stories and used detail in my conversation, and primarily relied on the convincingness of my lie rather than making my truth appear to be false. Talking about a vacation experience with a friend is a very simple task, and thus Media Richness Theory also supports my choice to use a lean communication media in order to make a fairly unequivocal exchange with a close friend. As the theory dictates, in unambiguous tasks, the most efficient way to communicate is through lean media.
In the end, despite my best efforts, my friend prevailed, and I felt as mentally used as when my opponent throws double paper in a best out of three match of RPS for the sweep. He explained to me that he could tell I had thought a lot about both stories, and there was no obvious answer. He said he made his decision based on the fact that I insisted on telling one story over the phone during the day and the other story on instant message. In the end, he asked himself if he were trying to convince someone of a lie would he tell him or her over the phone or via instant message? Essentially, he used my logic against me. (He knew I thought he was going to throw paper, and I would throw scissors, so he threw rock instead). While sitting down to write this assignment, I thought about my failure. I decided that people that are good liars would obviously choose the richer media as the medium for their lie in order to have the opportunity to convince, whereas people that are not good liars would choose the leaner medium in order to avoid the opportunity of detection. There is a fine distinction between these two different types of lies. Sometimes when I lie, I am less trying to fool, but rather trying to not be embarrassed. While they are connected, as whenever you make a lie you are inherently trying to mislead, there is a subtle difference that I never identified before.
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5 comments:
Hi Jason,
I found your blog to be very interesting. I love the analogy between good lying skills and winning a game of rock, paper, scissors. You're right in thinking that to be a good liar, you have to pick and choose words carefully in order to deceive your target. It is especially hard in this case since your friend knows one story is a lie and one is the truth.
I like how you used a more equivocal and ambiguous form of communication, the phone, for your lie rather than CMC media (which supports Media Richness Theory, richer media for more equivocal tasks like lying). The phone is a synchronous, rich medium that allows you to quickly react to responses from your friend to be more convincing. The verbal cues that exist through the phone give a tone of voice and allows emphasis on certain parts of the story to the listener so your lie can be more believable. I completely agree with your statement saying that bad liars would choose a leaner medium to avoid deception detection while good liars use a richer media to try to convince their listeners. In rich media, like FtF, bad liars may tend to exhibit frequent movements or stuttering, which give more cues for people to detect deception.
It was interesting that your friend realized which was your lie, even though you chose the richer media, the phone, to lie with, rather than the leaner media of IM. Since I am not a good liar, I would choose to present my lie with a leaner media as you said rather than a rich media because a lean media would give the receiver minimal cues to detect my lies, yet I can provide enough false details as I would in a rich media to try to be convincing (supporting Social Distance theory, lying more in leaner media). I wonder if your friend would still win if I told the lie.
I found your post very interesting Jason. I am impressed that you were able to pull off such a tough lie over the phone. I wrote my blog about almost the exact same kind of lie, but chose to do it over IM instead of the phone. My decision went far against MRT because well, I think there's a lot of inherent skill that goes into casting a lie in a rich medium. A lot of lying goes into wanting to lie I suppose, and if you feel like you have that benchmark when you're making your lie, then you should probably use a rich media to ensure its success. However, when I made my lie, I was a lot more unwilling as I went into it, so I suppose that it would have been a failure if I used the phone.
But what makes your results extraordinary and important is the fact that even though we lied about such similar things, our one variable (our choice of medium) turned out to not have an influence (at least in this instance).
Also, I've never really bought into the Media Richness Theory because in my opinion, the more you expose about yourself, the more open you make yourself to being detected. I'm impressed at how well you went about this assignment and how much it demonstrated about both your and my experimentation.
Thanks
ashish
Excellent post, Jason. Not only did you provide a good analogy for the whole situation you presented, you also helped me understand the Media Richness Theory in the context of online deception. I never thought (and many studies seem to gloss over) about how lying, depending on circumstance, can be equivocal or unequivocal. And also, since lying is a task that is entirely focused on efficiency (what’s more embarrassing than a failed lie or a bad liar), the Media Richness Theory does a good job expressing the appropriateness of the medium of communication. In my opinion, the fact that you were caught by your friend was due to the difficult experimental design in carrying out the assignment. It is hard to lie to someone when unmotivated, and possibly under more controlled circumstances (or if a greater period of planning were given) you could have gotten greater strategy to throw scissors, or was it rock? Or paper?
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