Assignment Four: Deception and Facebook Profiles

Practically all information in a Facebook profile is a “conventional signal,” which unlike an assessment signal is easy to manipulate at will. Although theoretically there is very little in an online profile that is impossible to manipulate, some information is clearly easier to control.

The name of the school that the student attends, personal photos, and the wall all are assessment signals. Taking “the wall” as an example, it is almost impossible to force others to write (or not write) on your wall in a particular manner, although one does have the ability to delete certain posts. In addition, it is unfeasible that somebody would lie about the school that they attend, as one must verify this information with a functional university email address.

In contrast, other aspects of the profile are easy to manipulate, and therefore are clearly conventional signals. Such components include interests, favorite movies, etc. This information is easily manipulated because it rarely can be independently verified.

In order to investigate deception online, I analyzed the profile of one of my friends. First, I had my friend reflect on how well he thinks that each component of his profile accurately reflects his true personality. The table below depicts his responses:

Political Views 5
Birthday 5
Residence 5
School Mailbox 5
Activities 5
Interests 4
Favorite Movies 4
Favorite Books 4
Favorite Quotes 5
“About Me” 2
Photos 4.5
Friends 5
Wall 5
Groups 4
Favorite Music 3
Mean 4.37
% Of Lies 47%


After looking at his responses, I myself independently analyzed the accuracy of his profile. I found that his self-report closely aligned with my independent investigation.

My experiment’s results conform to those of Catalina’s study. I too found that in keeping with Goffman and Baumeister's presentation goals, people lie frequently, but subtly in online profiles in order to balance the competing goals of both appearing attractive and honest. The fact that the communication channel is editable, asynchronous, and allows for only reduced cues, enabled my friend to lie frequently in order to appear more attractive to those reading his profile; this is evident by the fact that he lied 47% of the time.

This supports the Social Distance Theory’s prediction that people are likely to lie online due to the fact that lying makes people uncomfortable, and that this discomfort is alleviated by the reduced availability of cues in a mediated setting. This finding, in contrast, contradicts Hancock’s Feature Based Model, which predicts that people are more likely to lie while using communication channels that are recordless, synchronous, and distributed. Although Facebook is distributed, it is also asynchronous and recordable, which suggests that my friend would lie less frequently on Facebook than in a ftf situation (which is both synchronous and recordless). The fact that my friend lied an extremely high percentage of the time in his online profile, indicates that this is not true. Furthermore, the finding supports the Hyperpersonal Model’s expectation that people selectively self-present online in order to mold other’s impressions of them.

The fact that most of the lies were very subtle supports Catalina’s finding that the lies in online profiles are small in magnitude. Although he lied frequently, my friend wanted to appear honest and credible to those reading his information because of the fact that he interacts with many of them on a daily basis in ftf situations.

http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/although-facebook-profiles-are-becoming.html

http://comm245brown.blogspot.com/2007/09/assignment-4-option-2-fakebook.html