I think they're wrong. I think it's more likely to happen during interviews with Larry King or presidential debates. :D


When Do We Tell the Most Lies?

The next time you chat with someone on the phone, beware! People are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in e-mail messages, according to new research from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Why? It's not that it's easier to lie on the phone. It's that e-mails are automatically recorded--and even the smallest exaggerations can come back to haunt the sender, reports New Scientist. Some psychologists have admitted they're surprised by the results, since they suspected the opposite was true. They thought it would be harder to speak a lie out loud on the phone or in person than to write one. Deception makes people uncomfortable, so it would seem that the detachment of e-mailing would make it easier to lie. Not so!

Here are some whopper lies--and chances are you've helped spread one or two of these!

The study: Led by Jeff Hancock, the research involved 30 Cornell University students who were asked to keep a communications diary for a week, noting the number of conversations or e-mail exchanges that lasted longer than 10 minutes. Then they were asked to confess to how many lies they had told in each message.
The results showed that lies made up:
--14 percent of e-mails
--21 percent of Instant Messages
--27 percent of face-to-face interactions
--37 percent of phone calls

Find out the name of the World's Biggest Liar. Yes, there is someone with this dubious title.

Hancock found that when people knew the conversation was being recorded in any way--and could be replayed or re-read at a later date--they were much less likely to lie. This has far-reaching implications for business. When honesty is a priority, e-mail should be the communications tool of choice. The study findings were reported presented at the conference on human-computer interaction in Vienna, Austria.

I am too lazy to lie. Tell the truth and you don't have to remember what you said to whom.

We have a few clients who we ONLY communicate with via email. I don't think they intentionally lie, I think they say one thing and 30 seconds later have completely forgotten what they've said, then come back to us pissing and moaning about how we didn't do what they wanted us to. Of course, there's massive legal liability in our line of work, and pretty much every conversation (at least the salient points) get written down somewhere, AND they're supposed to send us a little legal document requesting analyses (but often don't).

nod nod. Writing is good.

This does not surprise me. Like Jinjre, there are certain individuals (colleagues as well as customers) with whom I only communicate via email. I also keep a nice little folder for each of them so I can pull out the email on demand. Has saved my butt more than once.

Likewise.

Here at work I keep a record of every conversation with my incredibly forgetful manager. Every time he starts arguing with me about some flaw on the website, I show him his email telling me to do it :P It's a good thing to keep records like that.

What percentage of those lies are social grease, and what are true lies?

There is a big difference between

"Boy, your baby looks so cute"
"No, you don't look fat in that"

from

"No honey, I was out with the boys last night"
"Yes, it is working as intended(/wink)"


I think one of the things(that makes it lie resistant) about e-mail is that you do not have to be pressured on the spot to respond to it immediately.

I don't think our clients (well, most of them at least) are lying to us, I think they're just boneheads who don't remember from one day to the next what they've said/done in the past. Their reality changes, so they believe that all of the world has changed to accomodate their reality. Not quite a lie, but definitely email has made these sorts of "miscommunications" less of a liability on our end.

Unfortunately, the course these conversations usually takes is by the client telling ME that I'M lying, and me having to forward them an attachment showing them that what we did is exactly what was agreed upon us doing. Which always leads to either pissiness on the part of the client (not liking to be proven wrong, and not wanting to take the responsibility for fooking up), or by having them change what they want us to do, THEN getting pissy because we're charging them for the work we've already done even though it's useless to them (If I'd known it was going to be garbage, do you think I'd have done it in the first place?!)

Yeah, dealing with customer's its always good to agree on a course of action and have it in writing. It doesn't take too many of those "You said...", "no you said..." conversations to realize how important that is.