Can Honesty Survive the Net?

“Are we more or less likely to lie to someone if we are communicating via email or text message than if we are speaking face-to-face?” asks Professor Jeff Hancock of Cornell University. According to In Character, “The first part of Hancock’s research revealed that the conventional wisdom is correct: liars are more likely to reveal themselves in face-to-face conversation than in any other medium. But Hancock discovered something else: using the computer actually encouraged people to lie if they were motivated to do so. His findings ’empirically demonstrate that there are potentially important differences for detecting deceit depending on whether the motivated sender is interacting in a face-to-face or in a computer mediated context.'”