UMass Robert Feldman studied college students meeting for the 1st time and found emails contain 3 times as many lies and exaggerations as face-to-face conversations.
UMass researches found that as people grow psychologically and physically further from the person they are in communication with, there is a higher likelihood of lying.Can you look me in the eye and say that?
Apparently many people can’t – if they intend to tell a lie.
A new study by researchers at University of Massachusetts at Amherst finds that email and instant messages are more likely to contain lies than face-to-face conversations, and that emails are the most likely to include them.
The research paper, “Liar, Liar, Hard Drive on Fire: How Media Context Affects Lying Behavior,” by Robert S. Feldman, professor of psychology and dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Mattityahu Zimbler, a graduate student, was published in the October issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
“I think when you’re online, you feel less constrained in terms of what you’re saying. Your facial cues and verbal behaviors can’t give you away, so it’s easier to be deceptive,” Feldman said.
The researchers studied 110 same-sex pairs of college students who engaged in 15-minute conversations either face to face, using email or via instant messaging. They were meeting for the first time and were told to get to know each other. Afterward, they were shown transcripts of what they said or wrote and asked to identify the inaccurate statements.
The researchers found that for a given number of words in the communication, emails contained three times as many lies and exaggerations as face-to-face conversations.
In most cases, people told lies “to make themselves look better,” Feldman said.
Feldman and Zimbler found that as people grow psychologically and physically further from the person they are in communication with, there is a higher likelihood of lying. And, because emails had still another separation of being sent and answered at different times, they were the most likely of the three forms of communication to contain lies.
“This follows quite a few studies that have found that most of the time, people don’t think they lie at all. Then, when they are asked to watch themselves, they are surprised to hear themselves say things that aren’t entirely true,” Feldman said.
A certain amount of “white lies” are probably necessary in everyday life, he said.
“To get along with other people, we sometimes need to say things that aren’t completely true. For instance, no one wants to hear that they look terrible,” he said.
Feldman, who has been the dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UMass-Amherst since 2009, is an expert on lying and author of the book “The Liar in Your Life,” published in 2009.
