Digital Deception
January 19th, 2008 by Adrienne
The first program at the Statler Auditorium this morning was a humorous and engaging lecture by Cornell professor Jeffrey Hancock. He took us through the worlds of Facebook, mySpace, Internet dating, and financial fraud to show how people disclose, shape, and manipulate their identities with the help of modern technologies.
Professor Hancock brought a scientist’s perspective to a common every-day experiences — interactions with other people and the lies we tell, from white lies and small fibs to more serious fabrications. He discussed differing theories on whether electronic media (cell phone, instant messaging, and email) make us lie more or less than when were communicating with someone face-to-face. It turns out that phone communication has the highest amount of lies told, but the second is face-to-face. Instant messaging and emails have a much lower rate of lies told — probably because IMs and emails can be recorded (saved as computer files or printed out) and people are much less likely to lie when evidence can be produced of what they’ve said.
The speaker also discussed human perceptions of lying and recent psychological evidence on the topic — it turns out that people are actually quite bad at guessing when they’re lied to, and common cues that we think give away lying (like bad eye contact and fidgeting) actually have no correlation with lying in reality. This is due in large part to the “Truth Bias,” a phenomenon which causes humans to naturally assume that other humans they are talking to are generally trustworthy and honest — an assumption that many think is necessary for society to function. One of the most fun and dynamic parts of Hancock’s presentation was his use of “clickers” to conduct real-time polling of the audience members. He even conducted an experiment on perceptions of lying using audience members as the participants!
