Honesty is the Best Policy

People always say, “Honesty is the best policy”. Although this may be true it might not always happen face-to-face or online. Deception online has always been a problem but now that we are more tech savvy and use the Internet more often it is a lot more common. People lie online about simple things like their age on Facebook or their height on a dating website but also big things like completely fake profiles. Identity based deception is usually more common online because it is easier to add a couple inches to your height on your profile than to lie about it in person. We are also not great at picking up on deception because we want to believe what we are told. We also sometimes prefer the deception over the truth if it is more appealing to us.

Deception online can be easier than deception face-to-face because of the lack of nonverbals. Without nonverbal communication it is easier to lie and get away with it since we have no other way of determining if the matter is true or not. In face-to-face conversation it is easier to pick up on lies because we can sometimes tell that they are lying by what they do but online we only have the words on the screen. This is where trust comes in. We tend to want to trust everyone so when someone lies we want to believe it. Trust is something that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Once it’s broken its hard to get back. For instance if you make plans with someone and they cancel because they are sick you would obviously be disappointed. Later on you see that the person who cancelled on you posted a picture with other people on Instagram. This person lied to you and lost some, if not all of your trust. Your trust for other people could also possibly be ruined because of a bad experience. It is the same thing with “Catfishing”. When the truth comes out everything changes. Even a lie of omission (leaving something out) can cause someone to lose trust. For example, in high school I would go out with my friends and my parents would ask me where I was going and of course I told them where but I never told them if there would be alcohol there or a ton of people or if my friends parents weren’t home. One time they found out and they grounded me because they didn’t trust me being out. I had to earn back their trust. My parents didn’t trust me as much anymore so I lost my credibility with my parents. Eventually they began to trust me again.