Communications technologies are far from equal when it comes to conveying the truth. The first study to compare honesty across a range of communications media has found that people are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in emails. The fact that emails are automatically recorded--and can come back to haunt(困扰) you--appears to be the key to the finding.
Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, asked 30 students to keep a communications diary for a week. In it they noted the number of conversations or email exchanges they had lasting more than 10 minutes, and confessed to how many lies they told. Hancock then worked out the number of lies per conversation for each medium. He found that lies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face－ to-face interactions and an astonishing 37 per cent of phone calls.
His results, to be presented at the conference on human-computer interaction in Vie
A. They are afraid of leaving behind traces of their lies.
B. They believe that honesty is the best policy.
C. They tend to be relaxed when using those media.
D. They are most practised at those forms of communication.
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