Law Lab Speaker Series >

apr
5
2010

Old Habits Die Hard: Can Technology Change Deception?

Jeff Hancock, Cornell University

Monday, April 5, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person (kglemaud@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

This talk is part of The Psychology and Economics of Trust and Honesty speaker series, led by Berkman Fellow Judith Donath and hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Law Lab. For more related to Bird's talk, see this page.

In this talk we'll consider some of the myths commonly held about deception, and use the intersection of technology and deception to surface and rethink our assumptions about how deception functions in our interpersonal and increasingly mediated lives. The talk will cover some experiments we have conducted and propose the notion of shaping deception practices in online environments.

About Jeff

Jeff Hancock is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and in the Faculty of Computing and Information Science, and co-Director of Cognitive Science at Cornell University. His work is concerned with how information technologies – such as email, instant messaging, and social networking sites – affect the way we understand and relate to one another, with a particular emphasis on deception. His research is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense, and his work on lying online has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, NPR, BBC and ABC News and the CBC documentary The Truth About Lying. Dr. Hancock earned his PhD in cognitive psychology at Dalhousie University, Canada, and joined Cornell in 2002.

Links

• Jeff's Faculty Page
• Jeff's publications
  

Click the play button below to start the audio.

Location

Berkman Center for Internet and Society

License

Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported

Copyright Holder

The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Radio Berkman 148: Lies, Damned Lies, and Technology

In an age when every conversation, email, and tweet could be digitally archived, how honest we are - or how deceptive - is open for scrutiny. But there is still a lot we don't know about the nature of deception. How can we tell if someone is telling the truth? Are there verbal cues, in addition to the sweaty palms and rapid heartbeat? Is there a difference between lies, or is every lie the same? And how does the medium of conversation - an email, a text message, a phone call - affect the type of lie we might tell? This week on the podcast, Judith Donath interviews Jeff Hancock, of the Social Media Lab at Cornell University, on how we lie, and the role technology plays in the evolution of the lie.

Produced 7 Apr 2010

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