Assignment #4: Lie to my Face

I found my opportunity to experiment in deception on Friday afternoon, after a coworker and I started talking about a trip that I took this summer. I told an unlikely story about my wife and I being invited to a deep sea fishing excursion with local old-timer fishermen. I lied to my target in a face-to-face encounter, and then elaborated about another incident on the same trip in a more truthful manner via email.
Because the lie was trivial and I had no attachment to the story that I was telling, I found it quite easy to get comfortable and sound completely believable. I was not concerned about the motivational impairment effect, which is the phenomena of highly motivated deception producers being more likely to be detected. I had no motivation to lie and I really didn't care if he found out. Indeed, my fraudulence remained undiscovered.
I believe that my experience contradicts the Social Distance Theory. This theory suggests that because lying is uncomfortable we tend to use as socially distance (lean) media as we can to tell a lie. This school of thought would consider a face-to-face encounter to be an unsatisfactory channel for deception. So many non-verbal cues and opportunities for detection could be dangerous for the deceiver. A leaner channel, such as email, would be a more productive (or at least, preferred) approach according to this theory.
On the other hand, the Media Richness Theory asserts that we require richer media for quivocal tasks such as lying. A richer medium provides us with a multiplicity of cues to help facilitate ambiguous encounters. Feedback from each communicator assists the process. According to this theory, a face-to-face encounter would be my best opportunity to deceive. However, despite my successes in lying FTF, my guess is that I would have done much better on the telephone.
Hancock's feature-based approach to deception finds the telephone as the preferred medium for deception. Both FtF and telephone communications share a couple of features, namely the synchronicity of the communication and the lack of persistence (recordlessness.) The distributed nature of the telephone makes it my preferred mode of deception. It provides the benefit of immediate verbal feedback, and subtle non-verbal cues with which I can reinforce the veracity of my statements. My findings in this assignment lead me towards Hancock's study which supports the idea that certain features of a medium will make the channel more or less conducive to deception.
I realized after I sent the follow-up email (describing truthful events of a particularly amazing restaurant in Portland,) that email would have been a substantially more difficult medium for me to deceive my target. In e-mail, I could take all the time that I need in order to craft my dishonesty. However, lacking any feedback would make it hard to know exactly how to describe my lie. Was he buying it? Do I need to elaborate on a specific suspicious detail? Again, we see more support for Hancock's approach to deception.
There are surely other factors which must be considered in this sort of test. If my target and I knew each other better, it would probably be much more difficult to get away with the lying. Also, we must consider that the adeptness of using and manipulating a particular mode of communication will add to the "richness" of the medium. If I am particularly experienced at using IM, for example, I might have a better shot at using such a lean channel for deception.