Deceit and suspicion: Dance partners
The dance of deception needs two people, at least; one sends the lie and the other receives it. Although few people can accurately tell a lie from truth when they just watch the performance, we do a little better when we have a chance to interact with - verbally dance with - the deceiver. If things seem amiss, perhaps because the sender is elaborating too much or avoiding our eye contact, our suspicions are aroused and we send out a few strategic probes. Most of the time, we don't want our dance partner to know we suspect anything - at least not yet - so we must do a bit of clever concealment ourselves.
Judee Burgoon and her research colleagues find this dance incredibly complex, with moves and countermoves, feints and parries, and with no simple patterns. They conducted some experiments in which each member of a conversational pair were given information that led to a bewildering assortment of suspicions about their partner's truthfulness. As expected, the subjects were not very good at detecting actual deceit, but they certainly noticed when their partner became suspicious of them because of some misinformation the experimenter provided. A suspicious person seems to have a difficult time hiding their thoughts as they probe for more evidence of deceit. As they try to conceal their feelings, they smile more, nod, use more eye contact, and try to suppress those little tell-tale signs of nervousness such as finger drumming and hair twirling. Their concealment strategy was not very effective. The attempt to camouflage their suspicions was spoiled by "leakage" of nervousness, especially in their voices. Their speech suffered from pauses and nervous vocalizations, and the interviewee couldn't help but notice. Suspiciousness is, apparently, very hard to conceal.
On the Internet, we do get a chance to dance with our partners, though it is mostly through typed text. The communication channel lacks all those nonverbal cues we try to use, ineptly perhaps, to detect deceit or suspicion, and their absence would seem to make it quite difficult to either detect deceit or notice when someone is becoming suspicious of our words. We can't see overcontrolled hand motions, and we can't hear hesitant pauses or raised pitch.
Without the benefit of visual or auditory cues, is there any way to tell if someone is being truthful? Just from an online interaction? Could Adam have really suspected anything? And if he had, would Silberman have noticed? Burgoon and her colleagues found that the nonverbal cues were the ones people relied on the most, but the content of the messages played a small role. There was a tendency for truthful subjects to use words in a slightly different way compared to nontruthful ones. Their words were somewhat more likely to be complete, direct, relevant, clear, and personalized. These are generally the same characteristics we use to judge the credibility of messages that appear in print, and that are intended to persuade us to vote for a candidate, buy a product, or contribute to some cause. It is possible that an Internet user who is deceiving through typed text could arouse suspicions by evasive and indirect answers, so perhaps Adam eventually did begin to suspect something was amiss.
Our own stereotypes about how certain people should behave will also trigger suspicions about truthfulness and deception on the Internet. These will be primitive, indeed, but as we discussed in an earlier chapter, we are cognitive misers and use stereotypes and categories routinely to save time. For better or worse, we expect people to act in predictable ways, given their age, sex, occupation, race, or status. We expect teens to use plenty of current slang, and anyone in a teen chat room who does not might be suspected of age-deception. Also, people might wonder whether someone who liberally adds "kewl" to his conversation is really a minor, even though he claimed to be older. We think women are more emotional than men, so a character with a male name who liberally displays emotion might trigger our suspicions. Using stereotypes to trigger suspicion about gender is particularly annoying to some women on the MUDs. Nancy Deuel studied gender relations on a MUD and quoted one participant as saying, "It seems to me that if a female character shows any bit of intelligence and sexual recognition, people will think she's a male IRL (in real life). If she flirts shamelessly and has a 'smutty description,' people will think she's a male IRL."
The stereotypes are flimsy crutches, but the ease with which people can experiment with identities on the net, and the difficulty we have detecting such experiments, makes people feel more vulnerable. We seem to use certain kinds of stereotypes even more heavily online to make judgments like this than we would in real life because we have little else to use. We will explore those online gender stereotypes in more detail in a later chapter.