Jeff Hancock: The Future Of Lying

Jeff Hancock: The Future of Lying
On TED talks, Jeff Hancock, a Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, spoke about the future of lying. Professor Hancock specialize in Social Science and one of his research focuses on how we have changed our behavior to lie less through online communication due to it being on permanent record. “The Butler,” “The Sock Puppet,” and “The Chinese Water Army” are types of deceptions that Professor Hancock and his team are tracking and documenting. On this video, Professor Hancock also talked about how back in the days, before writing surfaced about 5,000 years ago, every word that our ancestors has ever said or uttered are untraceable; but now that it’s the “networking age,” we are now in an environment where we are recording everything.
After watching Professor
A Qualitative Analysis of Everyday Lying” by Beata Arcimowicz, Katarzyna Cantarero and Emilia Soroko, it was said that the most frequent types of lies are egoistic lies and other-oriented lies. It was also said that egoistic lies are socially more unacceptable because it was known to better serve the liar; while other-oriented lies are intended to better serve other people. From my past observations, people do sometimes tell little lies to make their stories or themselves much more appealing and interesting, those lies maybe egoistic lies, but as long those little lies doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings, it does not bother me much. Now, I would call the lies I performed, when I have co-workers complained about things I believe was not worth complaining about, an “other-oriented” lies since I was doing it to help them have someone to go to whenever they needed to let their anger out instead of keeping it inside them to escalate into much worst. But if I have to be honest here, I do realized that it could also be called egoistic lies since those lies I performed benefitted me from not being hated