For this assignment I talked to a friend online and on the phone. Each time we talked about a time I went on vacation with my family. However, while talking online, I was lying, and I made up an entire vacation. Afterwards I asked my friend if she could tell when I was lying and she incorrectly guessed that it was the vacation I described to her on the phone.
I spend a lot of time preparing my lie. I realized that I had to have a lot of details about the trip or else it would be too obvious that I was making it up. During my lie I mentioned specific "memories" such as how miserable we were when it rained and how I caught my first fish. These lies served to help convince my friend that the vacation really happened. Because I was lying while talking on aim, it was a bit easier to make the vacation sound real. I didn't have to worry about visual channels or tone while describing the trip. I also didn't have to worry as much about the time it took me to respond to a question. When chatting online, pauses are natural and expected so I usually took a little extra time to make sure my story was consistent. However, if I had been using a medium that was synchronous, any pause would have been very suspicious. Thus when I was telling about the true vacation on the phone, it was very easy for me to avoid anything that would indicate a lie. I didn't even have to think about it, it just came naturally.
After the experiment, I asked my friend how she choose which vacation was a lie. She said her main way of distinguishing the trips was the amount of detail involved in the stories. This was interesting because one would expect there to have been more details in the real vacation, but there ended up being more details when I was talking about the false vacation because I spent so much time planning out what had "happened".
Social Distance theory predicts that in general people are more likely to lie when using instant messages or email. I found that it was rather easy to lie when using instant messaging and I'm sure it would be even easier if using email due to its asynchronous nature. Instant messaging is also a fairly lean medium which also helps make it easier to lie.
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Hi Matt, your experiences showed how easy it is for deception production to take place in an online space. Your lie through AIM also reverts back to the Hyperpersonal Model -- you mentioned putting all your energy into carefully planning out your time lapses in between responses, and being conscious of your verbal behavior. This greatly factors into the effect of your message.
Also, I found it interesting that because you anticipated what your friend would base her judgement on (amount of details), you were able to manipulate that accordingly. Everyone is more aware of these circumstances now, which makes everything harder. Is a person really lying to me, or does he/she know that I am expecting this lie because it's done in this manner, etc...
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