When The Deceit Is Uncovered

Many people believe that an averted gaze reveals a dishonest intent, but an averted gaze can simply signal anxiety or, just as easily, interest in something across the room. If people believe that something they do physically will announce their deception, they may be less likely to engage in that deception. A computer, though, protects people from these theoretically telltale tics. So the deindividuation Internet communication not only has the psychological effect of making users feel that they have more freedom to lie, it also has a practical element. It would seem, then, that the anonymity engendered by the physical and temporal distance of Internet communication results in a greater likelihood of online deceit. Yet there is a crucial assumption inherent in this line of thinking that, admittedly, may not be accurate. When we consider deceit in terms of deindividuation, we start with the idea that lying is prohibited. We then posit that the dynamics of being online encourage people to ignore this prohibition. Yet the situation may not be so simple. It may be that people don’t ignore a prohibition against online deceit so much as they do not feel that prohibition in the first place. In other words, lying online might not be a matter of breaking the rules. In fact, it’s possible that for some it’s a matter of following them.

No Surprises Here

It states that federal employees responsible for giving out oil contracts for years accepted gifts from those in the oil industry. Now imagine you read the same article, word for word, in the National Enquirer. It’s probable your reaction to the two articles would be very, very different. Just about all of us judge the truth of what we read or hear based on its source. And, of course, not all sources are created equal. In our evaluations of what is true and what is not, we account for context. The two researchers had participants, in pairs, interact with each other through two different methods of Internet communication. Other pairs conversed through a program that used avatars, graphic representations of the participants. I then reviewed the records of their conversations with them to identify the lies they’d spontaneously told. What Galanxhi and Nah found has important implications for an understanding of online deception generally. It seems that even being physically hidden did not completely salve the participants’ unease about engaging in deceit. Somehow, the deceit came more naturally to those using an avatar.

You Know Whats Coming Next

In other words, those who intended to lie adopted a kind of digital mask. On the surface, it seems that this finding can be wholly explained by the concept of deindividuation. If communicating with instant messages provides one level of psychological remove, donning graphic camouflage would likely provide another. Yet recall our earlier discussion about the experience of reading an article in the Wall Street Journal or the National Enquirer. As we noted, the context for the information we receive matters a great deal in how we evaluate it. It’s important to remember that workers at the Journals and Enquirers of the world make these distinctions, too. What would pass as a factual basis for reporting at the Enquirer would be laughable at the Journal. The notion of varying standards for reporting is not exclusively applicable to journalism. In other words, we don’t hold ourselves to a high standard of honesty online because, well, we’re online. My name for this conception of online deceit is honesty. In real life, we have one standard of honesty. In the digital world, we follow the weaker standard of eHonesty.

Once Is Enough

These are the unwritten rules that govern behavior in a society. In China, for instance, if you don’t hand someone a business card with two hands, you are breaking an important rule of etiquette. There is no law against handing over a business card with one hand, but social norms stand against such behavior. It isn’t illegal to cheat on a girlfriend or to invent an excuse to avoid helping a sibling move, but social norms encourage a certain level of honesty in our actions. Online, though, the social norms are very different. Occasionally online users stick to a firstname.lastname formulation, but very often they do not. Indeed, the mutability of identity in the digital realm is part of its appeal. For some users, identity play is the entire purpose of going online in the first place. There is nothing wrong, really, with identity play, with embracing the opportunity digital media afford to take on a new name, a new biography, even a new gender or race. The issue is that such behavior helps establish a social norm more tolerant of deception. The more permissive standard of honesty may inevitably lead to incidents in which lies spill over from the realm of the accepted to the realm of the hurtful and condemned. The problem, it seems, is that while some deception is generally accepted online, other acts of deceit are generally condemned. There are no clear boundaries between harmless online identity play and hurtful manipulation. What is par for the digital course for one user is emotional cruelty to another. These issues are often all the more intense online, though, both because deceit is so much easier to perpetrate and because the online world is so new. The social norms of the Internet are only decades old, at most. To a large extent, they are still being created. Another element of the digital dishonesty puzzle is that the Internet does not exist in a vacuum. As many prominent incidents of Internet deception have shown, there may not be a right answer, but it’s certainly possible to get this question wrong. In 2007, a footnote in a legal filing by the Federal Trade Commission revealed something curious. The fun stops, of course, when the deceit is uncovered. The Internet is both the frontier of technology and the frontier of a new kind of social interaction. There is no filter for the lie that would harm us or hurt us.