Deception

A student of mine, Taryn, had finished her junior year and was doing a summer internship. One night at a club, a handsome but obviously underage boy approached her and introduced himself as “Paul.” After exchanging pleasantries, he told her, “I’m a pilot with United Airlines.” So that’s how you want to play it! Taryn thought. She returned the lie, saying, “I’m an account exec with Chase.” Banter completed, their conversation progressed, and—somewhat to Taryn’s surprise—attraction kindled. Before parting ways, she gave Paul her number. The next day he called, and once again they felt a passionate connection. He asked her to dinner, and when he picked her up, she was dumbfounded to see him driving a Porsche.

Paul was a 27-year-old pilot. At dinner, Taryn joked about his “baby face” and told him how she thought he had lied about his job. She was setting the stage for confessing her own lie about being an account executive at Chase. But when he replied, “I wouldn’t lie—I value honesty above all else,” she held off.

In the weeks that followed, they fell in love. Taryn kept looking for chances to tell him the truth but couldn’t find them. By August, she was an emotional wreck. The week before she had to leave for school, she came clean. It was Paul’s turn to be dumbfounded. He said, “All summer you’ve kept this from me? I have no idea who you are, or what kind of game you’re playing. But I want no part of it—or you.” And he left. He ignored her texts, e-mails, and calls. It was over. Taryn returned to school, devastated.

When most of us think of deception, we think of situations like Taryn’s, in which one person communicates false information to another. But people deceive in any number of ways, only some of which involve saying untruthful things. Deception occurs when people deliberately use uninformative, untruthful, irrelevant, or vague language for the purpose of misleading others. The most common form of deception doesn’t involve saying anything false at all: studies document that concealment—leaving important and relevant information out of messages—is practiced more frequently than all other forms of deception combined (McCornack, 2008).

As noted in previous chapters, deception is commonplace during online encounters. People communicating on online dating sites, posting on social networking sites, and sending messages via e-mail and text distort and hide whatever information they want, providing little opportunity for the recipients of their messages to check accuracy. Some people provide false information about their backgrounds, professions, appearances, and gender online to amuse themselves, to form alternative relationships unavailable to them offline, or to take advantage of others through online scams (Rainey, 2000).

Deception is uncooperative, unethical, impractical, and destructive. It exploits the belief on the part of listeners that speakers are communicating cooperatively—“tricking” listeners into thinking that the messages received are informative, honest, relevant, and clear when they’re not (McCornack, 2008). Deception is unethical because, when you deceive others, you deny them information that may be relevant to their continued participation in a relationship, and, in so doing, you fail to treat them with respect (LaFollette & Graham, 1986). Deception is also impractical. Although at times it may seem easier to deceive than to tell the truth (McCornack, 2008), deception typically calls for additional deception. In Taryn’s case, she had to conceal her internship from Paul throughout the summer. Finally, deception is destructive: it creates intensely unpleasant personal, interpersonal, and relational consequences. As occurred with Taryn and Paul, the discovery of deception typically causes intense disappointment, anger, and other negative emotions and frequently leads to relationship breakups (McCornack & Levine, 1990).

At the same time, keep in mind that people who mislead you may not be doing so out of malicious intent. Many cultures view ambiguous and indirect language as hallmarks of cooperative verbal communication. In addition, sometimes people intentionally veil information out of kindness and desire to maintain the relationship, such as when you tell a close friend that her awful new hairstyle looks great because you know she’d be agonizingly self-conscious if she knew how bad it really looked (McCornack, 1997; Metts & Chronis, 1986). For me, this was the most haunting aspect of Taryn’s story: she sincerely loved Paul and wanted to build a life with him, but she was doomed by a seemingly small lie told during playful bar banter.

LearningCurve

Chapter 7

Postscript

At the time that General George Washington ordered his officers to read aloud the words of Thomas Paine to their troops, the war to create the United States appeared lost. Washington, along with his officers and soldiers, seemed doomed to certain death. But as they stood on the icy shore of the Delaware River, this simple act of verbal communication—“These are the times that try men’s souls . . .”—transformed the mood of the moment. Fatigued men’s spirits were uplifted, and the soldiers set out across a seemingly impassable river to triumph in a mission that just a few hours earlier had seemed hopeless.

What words have helped you to ford the raging rivers of your life? How have you used verbal communication to inspire others to face their own daunting personal and interpersonal challenges?

More than 200 years ago, a disheartened general borrowed the words of a patriot to raise his soldiers’ spirits. In so doing, he created the first link in a chain of events that led to the creation of a country. Now, centuries later, the power of verbal communication to inspire, uplift, embolden, and create is still available to each of us.