Do People Lie More Often When Using Social Media?

Technology has provided more ways to connect with people and, potentially, to lie more frequently.  Indeed, social psychology has demonstrated that lying is an important, and frequent, part of everyday social interactions.  

As communication technologies become more ubiquitous in our daily interactions, an important question for developers is to determine how the design of these technologies affects lying behavior. 

Social psychologists and communication scholars have long wondered not just who lies the most, but where people tend to lie the most, that is, in person or through some other communication medium.

One distinguished researcher in this are is Jeff Hancock, Professor of Communications at Stanford University. He  is well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology, from sending texts and emails to detecting fake online reviews. His TED Talk on deception has been seen over 1 million times and he’s been featured as a guest on “CBS This Morning” for his expertise on social media.

In n 2004, Hancock and his colleagues had 28 students report the number of social interactions they had via face-to-face communication, the phone, instant messaging and email over seven days. Students also reported the number of times they lied in each social interaction. 

The results suggested people told the most lies per social interaction on the phone. The fewest were told via email.

The findings aligned with a framework Hancock called the ‘feature-based model’. According to this model, specific aspects of a technology, whether people can communicate back and forth seamlessly, whether the messages are fleeting and whether communicators are distant, predict where people tend to lie the most. In Hancock’s study, the most lies per social interaction occurred via the technology with all of these features: the phone. The fewest occurred on email, where people couldn’t communicate synchronously and the messages were recorded.

Now, in a new study, 250 people recorded their social interactions and number of interactions with a lie over seven days, across face-to-face communication, social media, the phone, texting, video chat and email.

As in Hancock’s original study, people told the most lies per social interaction over media that were synchronous and unrecorded and when communicators were distant: over the phone or on video chat. They told the fewest lies per social interaction via email. Interestingly, though, the differences across the forms of communication were small.

Differences among participants, how much people varied in their lying tendencies, were more predictive of deception rates than differences among media.

Despite changes in the way people communicate over the past two decades, along with ways the Covid-19 pandemic changed socialisation and now people seem to lie systematically and in alignment with the feature-based model.  There are several possible explanations for these results, though more work is needed to understand exactly why different media lead to different lying rates.

It’s possible that certain media are better facilitators of deception than others. Some media, the phone, video chat, might make deception feel easier or less costly to a social relationship if caught.

Deception rates might also differ across technology because people use some forms of technology for certain social relationships. For example, people might only email their professional colleagues, while video chat might be a better fit for more personal relationships.

Two Important Conclusions 

First, there are, overall, small differences in lying rates across media. An individual’s tendency to lie matters more than whether someone is emailing or talking on the phone.

Second, there’s a low rate of lying across the board. Most people are honest, a premise consistent with truth-default theory, which suggests most people report being honest most of the time and there are only a few prolific liars in a population.

Since 2004, social media have become a primary place for interaction. Yet a common misperception persists that communicating online or via technology, as opposed to in person, leads to social interactions that are of lower quality.   People often believe that just because we use technology to interact, honesty is harder to come by and users aren’t well served. 

Not only is this perception misguided, but it is also unsupported by empirical evidence. The belief that lying is rampant in the digital age doesn’t match the data.

Stanford University:    ACM Digital Library:      Nieman Lab:      The Conversation:     Talking Points Memo:     

California News Times:      FUNTiTech: 

You Might Also Read: 

Scientists Say Social Media Is A Risk To Humanity: