4: Option 2- Sweet Little Facebook Lies

Examining Facebook profiles seems like a great way to extend the findings of Catalina’s study on online dating digital deception. I decided to dissect the Facebook profile of a friend I met during freshman year of college, about three years ago, who I now live with. In Hancock’s “Digital Deception” article, he discusses Donath’s description of assessment signals, “costly displays directly related to an organisms characteristics” and conventional signals “low-cost displays that are only conventionally associated with a characteristic” (291). I had my friend assess the accuracy of her responses to all the main features of her profile on a scale of 1 (completely false) to 5 (completely accurate) including assessment signals, such as her sex (5), birthday (5), college email address (5) and picture (3.5). While it may not always be the case in digital spaces, I consider these assessment signals in the context of Facebook. Since Facebook friends usually know each other in real life as well, it would be very difficult for her to escape the physical realities that she is female, in her 20’s, and has the physical features shown in her picture. Obviously it would be nearly impossible to fake the cornell.edu email address. She also rated her conventional signals including Political Views (5), Activities (3), Favorite Music (4), TV Shows (5), Movies (5), and Books (5).

Catalina discussed Goffman and Baumeister’s understanding of “Self-Presentation Goals”. Basically, people want to appear attractive so they prefer a media that is editable, asynchronous, and has reduced cues compared to FtF and all these factors which can lead to deception go along with Selective Self-Presentation (Facebook fits this very well). The balancing force against deception is that people also don’t want to seem dishonest. They consider that in the future they may meet people reading their profile, or those people they already know viewing their profile may get to know them better, and the selective presenters don’t want to be caught lying. Therefore, as Catalina pointed out, people will tend to lie frequently but also subtly.

My analysis of my friend’s profile seemed to fit these theories. She gave herself a 3 for activities because she had listed that she was an author in a student literary magazine, which she intended on contributing too, but never actually did. I would also say she had some subtle deception in this category since she listed herself as the president of the Red Cross Club, when I know she is actually co-president with another friend of ours. Both of these slight lies make her seem worthy of more admiration for being very involved in so many activities. For music she also didn’t give herself a perfect score, because it is hard to be all inclusive when listing a few bands or styles. Perhaps her most interesting rating was for her picture, which she gave a 3.5. While most people would argue that the picture is hard to lie with, she told me that she had taken several pictures of herself and then ‘photoshopped’ the best one to give herself more hair, and make her eyes greener. I would almost argue for an even lower rating, since I know she also wears color enhancing contacts to change her actually hazel eyes to appear very green. It is interesting that she considered this set of deceptions less ‘false’ than mentioning a literary magazine she wasn’t included in. All in all, we both thought each of her deceptions were subtle enough to go unnoticed by the average Facebook stalker.