Assignment 4: I know when you're lying

While the Internet is generally thought of as an ideal place to engage in deceptive behavior, a Facebook profile may not be the best place to test that out. On Facebook, many, if not most or all, of the people who look at your profile know you to some extent. Anyone can create a completely fake profile, but passing it off as real is nearly impossible unless the only people you friend are people who have never met you. What most people do is truthfully present their assessment signals, and tweak their conventional signals. It is debatable what would be considered assessment signals and what would be considered conventional signals on a Facebook profile. However, assuming that the people who look at you Facebook profile have spoken to you in person at least once, some characteristics that would fall under assessment would include profile picture, sex, college and year, birth date, and contact information. These are things that people would know having seen you or be able to easily verify. Assessment signals are more costly to display and thereby harder to fake. They are, as stated in the Hancock Digital Deception article, “links to a person’s ‘real world’ identity.” Conventional signals, on the other hand, are easy to manipulate. Most aspects of a Facebook profile fall under this category, including any of the information under personal information, groups, picture albums, and tagged pictures.

I asked my friend “John” to rate his level of honesty in his Facebook profile following the Catalina model, 1 for least accurate, 5 for most accurate. I noticed that just about everything he rated as 5 or a 1, which was usually a result of a joke, I agreed with. However, the aspects that he rated 3’s or 4’s I had slightly different opinions in that I thought he was less truthful. For example, for his Favorite Music section, he ranked himself a 4, showing that he didn’t believe it was completely accurate, but was for the most part. However, I know for a fact that he listens to a lot of mainstream rap and hip-hop, none of which was included in his list. He did include a lot of underground bands and classic artists, a few of which I’ve heard him mention but most of them never connected him to. I feel he probably included a number of these to make himself seem like less of a conformer because he didn’t want to admit how much he liked Kanye West or Timbaland to the entire Internet. However, he feels very comfortable admitting that to me in person. Also, if you look at “John’s” groups, you would see that he is in both the Cornell Democrats and Cornell Republicans groups, a move that obviously has some level of dishonesty in it.

My observations are in line with the Hyperpersonal and Social Distance Theories. “John” engaged in a lot of selective self-presentation in describing his personal info, what groups he chose to be in, and what pictures he chose to have of himself, exaggerating a lot of the information he wanted to be more public, thereby supporting the Hyperpersonal theory. In addition, he seemed fairly comfortable being dishonest and misleading about a number of things on his profile that he wouldn’t have necessarily said in person. This is in line with the Social Distance Theory which says that people who are uncomfortable lying in person feel more comfortable doing so over leaner, online media because there are fewer cues. Overall, “John’s” profile was fairly honest, but the things he lied about were all conventional signals that he would not have typically lied about in face-to-face interaction.

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