Assignment 4, Option 2: The Unintentional Liar

Facebook is an obsession that is sweeping the nation. At any given time, thousands, even millions of people are checking their Facebooks – writing on friends’ “walls,” posting pictures, or editing their profile. On all Facebook profiles, there are both assessment signals and conventional signals. An assessment signal is one that cannot be fake – it is very reliable because a person MUST possess a certain trait in order to display it. For example, on Facebook, you must verify that you are a Cornell student by given them your email address, which must be valid, and the only way to get a Cornell email address is to be a student (or faculty) at the school. A conventional signal, however, can be easily faked. These are very unreliable signals because anybody can claim to possess certain traits. An example of this would be your personal preferences (music, movies, etc.), interests and activities, and even your appearance.

Conventional signals on a Facebook profile include pretty much everything. All of the following can easily be lied about on Facebook or selected and displayed even though they aren’t true:

• Your name, gender, relationship status, birthday, hometown, political & religious views
• Activities, interests, and favorites
• Your pictures and groups (can post other people’s pictures or join groups for things you don’t actually like/care about)

Assessment signals on Facebook are few and far between. The only really obvious one is an email address since you need a valid one to register on Facebook and join a network. This can be especially true for student email addresses which also can reveal where you go to school.

It may be harder to deceive people through Facebook because it is a networking site. This means that most, or many, of the people who you’re Facebook friends with know you personally and can call you out on a lie, such as an incorrect age, location, interest, etc.

I asked my friend how accurate she feels the different components of her profile are:

1. For activities, she gave herself a 2 because she only had one activity listed, when in reality she participates in many others, so she didn’t think it was an accurate representation of herself.
2. On interests, she gave herself a 4, because although she used to be interested in everything it listed, she said it was a little out of date and she wasn’t too into some of the stuff on there anymore.
3. For movies, books, and music, she gave herself a 4 because most of her favorites were listed, just not some of the most recent ones.
4. For TV shows she gave herself a 5 because it was up to date and accurate.
5. Her favorite quotes were not so accurate. She admitted that they were quotes “she wished she thought were cool.” So if she found a quote she thought sounded cool, she posted it regardless of what she thought of it. For this area, she gave herself a 2.
6. For pictures she gave herself a 5 because they were all accurate portrayals of her.
7. For groups she gave herself a 4 because she had 78 listed. She said that although she was interested in all of the group topics at some time, she hadn’t looked at them in a long time and was sure some weren’t relevant anymore.

After discussing her opinions of her own profile, I went back and compared her answers to what I thought was true. I believe that she was perfectly accurate. She didn’t try to deceive me to my face and readily admitted when something wasn’t all true. The magnitude of all of her “lies” was very low – she didn’t purposely try to deceive anyone with her profile, so everything was almost all accurate. The frequency of her “lies” did surprise her though. I also feel that in person, during our conversation about her Facebook, she didn’t lie at all. So in her profile, although she never meant to lie about anything, she did lie more frequently than she thought about very little things. This follows the deception strategy of lying frequently and subtly about low magnitude things.