For this assignment, I chose to see whether my friend could determine the truthfulness of stories in both FTF and CMC contexts. I tried to tell two equally plausible travel stories, though only the one I told in person was true.
During my FTF encounter, I told my friend about my sixth grade trip to Disney World. Because I was aware that my story was being scrutinized for fabrications, my delivery probably had all the earmarks of a lie. My storytelling capacities improved over the course of the story, but my friend remained skeptical throughout. Lying on the internet proved easier than telling the truth in person. While conversing through instant messages, there was no need for me to conceal the telltale signs that characterize FTF deception.
My invented story consisted of a road trip with my parents to the Grand Canyon. I tried to include details which might persuade my friend to believe that I was conveying a rich, nuanced memory. Supposedly, my mom’s fear of heights resulted in us forgoing the donkey ride around the canyon and spending most of our time in the gift shop. Despite my best efforts, my friend correctly identified my trip to the Grand Canyon as fictitious. She recognized that a road trip to the Grand Canyon would be a substantial undertaking for a family from Long Island and also questioned my inability to “remember” which side of the canyon we visited.
In this case, Social Distance Theory explains my decision to choose instant messaging as a medium for deception. I thought there would be more room for error if I were physically removed from the person I was trying to deceive. On the other hand, the Feature-Based Approach predicts that instant messaging and FTF interactions will yield equivalent lie frequencies. Both types of interactions are synchronous, though instant messaging possesses this quality to a lesser extent. Instant messaging compensates by being distributed, unlike FTF situations, which have the advantage of recordlessness. For this assignment, recordlessness probably played a small role in considerations regarding which media to use in deception, since the lies were innocuous and part of a game-like exercise. Though my friend ultimately decided that my online story was the lie, she noted that she was skeptical of both stories for different reasons.
Online, the most salient tip-off was the content I presented, while nervous giggling caused her to question my face-to-face honesty. The dubious facts I presented online eventually outweighed my suspicious FTF affect in my friend’s decision. I tend to think that if both stories were equally plausible, however, the distribution inherent in instant messaging would have worked to my advantage and my friend would have believed the online story. When recordlessness is not crucial, instant messaging may prove superior to face-to-face interactions, as Social Distance Theory would predict.
comments:
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-option-1-deception-experiment.html
http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/4-facebook-lies.html
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I like that you take into account the fact that consciously doing an experiment on a specific subject might lead to error. You write "earmarks of a lie." Was the nervous giggling intentional on your part?
You say that your friend questioned your ability to remember which side of the Canyon you visited but since you chose to use IM to communicate, did you have time to formulate a response and cover up any hesitation that would have occurred in FtF?
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