4: Luke, I am your father

While talking to my friend C on aim, I attempted to deceive her with a false travel story that I had said occurred over the summer. I used a story I had heard from another friend, which went as follows: While in a fast food establishment standing in line to order lunch with a bunch of friends from high school, a man in line kept staring at one of my friends “R.” I described my friend “R” as rash and confrontational. After becoming uncomfortable, my friend R approached this man and asked him if he had a problem, to which he responded that he was sorry for staring, but looked just like a daughter he had lost. R was embarrassed, said she was sorry, and asked if there was anything she could do. The man replied, “Could you wave to me and say, ‘bye daddy’ when I leave the store?” R found this a strange request, but feeling the need to make up for her earlier behavior, agreed and did as he asked when he left the store. When it was her turn to order, her bill came to around $35, which is exorbitant in a fast food place for one person. When she questioned this, the cashier replied, “Your dad said you would pay for him.” My friend C was spellbound by my story, continually interrupting to ask what happened next and constantly providing feedback like ‘oh man,’ ‘lol,’ and ‘then what happened?’, amongst others, in between sentence-long messages sent. Although C found it strange that I had neglected to tell her this story after seeing her nearly every day, she did not seem to otherwise doubt my sincerity. I use her feedback and interest in the happenings of the story to confirm that she had no idea she was being conned. Now, I’ve had to sit through the original teller of the story con others FtF, and I am barely ever able to keep a straight face while listening to some poor sap get fooled. I believe I was much more successful at lying in lean media than in rich media, where my facial expressions, blushing, giggling, averted eyes, altered voice etc. would have given me away. Due to the reduced physical cues, a fairly poor liar like myself was able to go by undetected. This experiment seems to support both the Social Distance Theory and the Feature Based Theory. The Social Distance theory’s main tenet is clear in my usual discomfort at lying FtF, and the ease with which I was able to lie online. Since I found lying uncomfortable, using a socially distributed medium not only put me at ease, but reduced her suspicions due to reduced social cues. However, due to the synchronicity of the medium, I was able to answer C’s questions and react to her feedback, making the story seem to develop more spontaneously and appear more plausible. Like the Social Distance Theory, the distribution between C and I contributed to the success of my lie. Since I told C afterwards that I was lying, recordlessness was not so much of an issue since I was not concerned with being caught.
Less interestingly, during my true story about an instance of my summer vacation told face to face about a pretty hectic babysitting experience, C, although more skeptical of everything I said due to my recent lie and the fact that my FtF story was told after my lean media lie, eventually believed me since she is familiar enough with my mannerisms and expressions to know when I’m telling the truth or not. Plus, she knows enough about my life to be able to confirm the identities of people in the story and the place. I think this element of being familiar with the person with whom you are interacting has a huge impact on the ability to detect FtF lies, and to a lesser extent, CMC lies. Due to this factor, I do not believe the Media Richness theory, which indicates lying occurs more frequently in rich media, would occur very successfully between good friends.