New media
Technotreachery: The new white liars
By Heidi Dawley
Jan 4, 2007, 01:04

And with the rise of the digital society, it seems the art of white lying has taken a major step forward. Among all the other advantages of such advances as mobile phones and email is their superior role as vehicles for graceful lying. They seem to make it so much easier.

Call it technotreachery.

“It makes them feel less guilty to do it over machines than face to face,” says a spokesperson for Friends Provident, an asset management company that recently commissioned a study in which nearly 1,500 people were polled online about their attitudes toward white lies.

The finding: Almost three quarters owned up to using email, cell phones and text messaging to tell porky pies--Cockney rhyming slang for lies--believing it makes the whole fibbing business that much easier.

Overall, the survey found that nearly four out of five, some 81 percent, admitted to telling white lies at least once a day, digitally or otherwise, and a slightly larger share, 84 percent, believe a few white lies here or there won’t do any harm.

The top topic for white lies is fibbing about whether one has bought new clothes and the cost of them. This was followed by fibbing about how good a friend or partner looked in some item of clothing. Rounding out the top five: what foods people say they eat or have eaten, how much they've had to drink and what they weigh.

The most popular vehicles for technotreachery, it turns out, are email and text messaging, followed by the cell phone.

These findings come as no surprise to Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of psychology at University of California, Santa Barbara, who has studied the subject of deception for two decades.

Simply put, it's that much easier to lie to someone when it's not a face-to-face conversation, or so white liars believe.

“They may feel they are less likely to be caught because they aren’t using all the non-verbal cues, like facial expressions, body movements, tone of voice. All of that is off the table when you use technology,” she says. “People have this belief that people can look them in the eye and tell if they are lying.”

But in fact, as DePaulo’s research has determined, that's not really so.

Forget all the talk about body language and other telltale signs; people simply aren't very adept at figuring out if someone is lying. She's found that on average people only managed a 54 percent detection rate--not much better than the 50 percent rate you’d expect from just guessing whether a person is lying.

Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended Dec. 24, the top five parent companies were Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Time Warner and News Corp. The top five brands were Yahoo, Google, MSN/Windows Live, Microsoft and AOL.

Gus Plc was the top advertiser with 8.12 million impressions, followed by NexTag at 3.87 million, Reunion.com at 2.48 million, Blockbuster at 2.00 million and Low Rate Source at 1.61 million.

Sessions per person dropped 6.25 percent to 15, and domains visited per person were down 7.89 percent to 35. PC time per person was down 8.08 percent to 15 hours, 5 minutes and 56 seconds.