The future of lying
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0:00 - 0:04Let me tell you, it has been a fantastic month for deception.
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0:04 - 0:08And I'm not even talking about the American presidential race. (Laughter)
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0:08 - 0:13We have a high-profile journalist caught for plagiarism,
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0:13 - 0:16a young superstar writer whose book involves
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0:16 - 0:19so many made up quotes that they've pulled it from the shelves;
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0:19 - 0:22a New York Times exposé on fake book reviews.
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0:22 - 0:23It's been fantastic.
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0:23 - 0:27Now, of course, not all deception hits the news.
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0:27 - 0:30Much of the deception is everyday. In fact, a lot of research
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0:30 - 0:35shows that we all lie once or twice a day, as Dave suggested.
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0:35 - 0:38So it's about 6:30 now, suggests that most of us should have lied.
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0:38 - 0:40Let's take a look at Winnipeg. How many of you,
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0:40 - 0:43in the last 24 hours -- think back -- have told a little fib,
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0:43 - 0:46or a big one? How many have told a little lie out there?
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0:46 - 0:48All right, good. These are all the liars.
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0:48 - 0:51Make sure you pay attention to them. (Laughter)
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0:51 - 0:53No, that looked good, it was about two thirds of you.
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0:53 - 0:56The other third didn't lie, or perhaps forgot,
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0:56 - 0:59or you're lying to me about your lying, which is very,
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0:59 - 1:03very devious. (Laughter) This fits with a lot of the research,
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1:03 - 1:06which suggests that lying is very pervasive.
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1:06 - 1:10It's this pervasiveness, combined with the centrality
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1:10 - 1:13to what it means to be a human, the fact that we can
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1:13 - 1:15tell the truth or make something up,
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1:15 - 1:17that has fascinated people throughout history.
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1:17 - 1:20Here we have Diogenes with his lantern.
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1:20 - 1:23Does anybody know what he was looking for?
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1:23 - 1:27A single honest man, and he died without finding one
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1:27 - 1:30back in Greece. And we have Confucius in the East
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1:30 - 1:32who was really concerned with sincerity,
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1:32 - 1:35not only that you walked the walk or talked the talk,
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1:35 - 1:38but that you believed in what you were doing.
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1:38 - 1:40You believed in your principles.
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1:40 - 1:43Now my first professional encounter with deception
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1:43 - 1:47is a little bit later than these guys, a couple thousand years.
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1:47 - 1:50I was a customs officer for Canada back in the mid-'90s.
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1:50 - 1:53Yeah. I was defending Canada's borders.
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1:53 - 1:57You may think that's a weapon right there. In fact,
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1:57 - 2:02that's a stamp. I used a stamp to defend Canada's borders. (Laughter)
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2:02 - 2:06Very Canadian of me. I learned a lot about deception
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2:06 - 2:09while doing my duty here in customs,
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2:09 - 2:12one of which was that most of what I thought I knew about deception was wrong,
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2:12 - 2:13and I'll tell you about some of that tonight.
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2:13 - 2:17But even since just 1995, '96, the way we communicate
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2:17 - 2:21has been completely transformed. We email, we text,
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2:21 - 2:23we skype, we Facebook. It's insane.
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2:23 - 2:27Almost every aspect of human communication's been changed,
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2:27 - 2:29and of course that's had an impact on deception.
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2:29 - 2:32Let me tell you a little bit about a couple of new deceptions
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2:32 - 2:34we've been tracking and documenting.
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2:34 - 2:38They're called the Butler, the Sock Puppet
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2:38 - 2:40and the Chinese Water Army.
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2:40 - 2:42It sounds a little bit like a weird book,
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2:42 - 2:44but actually they're all new types of lies.
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2:44 - 2:47Let's start with the Butlers. Here's an example of one:
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2:47 - 2:51"On my way." Anybody ever written, "On my way?"
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2:51 - 2:54Then you've also lied. (Laughter)
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2:54 - 2:59We're never on our way. We're thinking about going on our way.
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2:59 - 3:01Here's another one: "Sorry I didn't respond to you earlier.
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3:01 - 3:03My battery was dead." Your battery wasn't dead.
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3:03 - 3:05You weren't in a dead zone.
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3:05 - 3:07You just didn't want to respond to that person that time.
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3:07 - 3:09Here's the last one: You're talking to somebody,
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3:09 - 3:11and you say, "Sorry, got work, gotta go."
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3:11 - 3:15But really, you're just bored. You want to talk to somebody else.
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3:15 - 3:18Each of these is about a relationship,
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3:18 - 3:22and this is a 24/7 connected world. Once you get my cell phone number,
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3:22 - 3:25you can literally be in touch with me 24 hours a day.
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3:25 - 3:27And so these lies are being used by people
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3:27 - 3:30to create a buffer, like the butler used to do,
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3:30 - 3:34between us and the connections to everybody else.
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3:34 - 3:35But they're very special. They use ambiguity
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3:35 - 3:37that comes from using technology. You don't know
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3:37 - 3:40where I am or what I'm doing or who I'm with.
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3:40 - 3:43And they're aimed at protecting the relationships.
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3:43 - 3:45These aren't just people being jerks. These are people
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3:45 - 3:48that are saying, look, I don't want to talk to you now,
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3:48 - 3:50or I didn't want to talk to you then, but I still care about you.
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3:50 - 3:53Our relationship is still important.
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3:53 - 3:54Now, the Sock Puppet, on the other hand,
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3:54 - 3:56is a totally different animal. The sock puppet isn't
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3:56 - 3:59about ambiguity, per se. It's about identity.
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3:59 - 4:01Let me give you a very recent example,
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4:01 - 4:03as in, like, last week.
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4:03 - 4:06Here's R.J. Ellory, best-seller author in Britain.
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4:06 - 4:08Here's one of his bestselling books.
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4:08 - 4:12Here's a reviewer online, on Amazon.
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4:12 - 4:14My favorite, by Nicodemus Jones, is,
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4:14 - 4:18"Whatever else it might do, it will touch your soul."
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4:18 - 4:20And of course, you might suspect
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4:20 - 4:22that Nicodemus Jones is R.J. Ellory.
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4:22 - 4:27He wrote very, very positive reviews about himself. Surprise, surprise.
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4:27 - 4:30Now this Sock Puppet stuff isn't actually that new.
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4:30 - 4:33Walt Whitman also did this back in the day,
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4:33 - 4:36before there was Internet technology. Sock Puppet
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4:36 - 4:39becomes interesting when we get to scale,
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4:39 - 4:42which is the domain of the Chinese Water Army.
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4:42 - 4:44Chinese Water Army refers to thousands of people
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4:44 - 4:47in China that are paid small amounts of money
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4:47 - 4:50to produce content. It could be reviews. It could be
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4:50 - 4:53propaganda. The government hires these people,
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4:53 - 4:55companies hire them, all over the place.
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4:55 - 4:59In North America, we call this Astroturfing,
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4:59 - 5:02and Astroturfing is very common now. There's a lot of concerns about it.
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5:02 - 5:06We see this especially with product reviews, book reviews,
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5:06 - 5:10everything from hotels to whether that toaster is a good toaster or not.
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5:10 - 5:14Now, looking at these three reviews, or these three types of deception,
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5:14 - 5:17you might think, wow, the Internet is really making us
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5:17 - 5:20a deceptive species, especially when you think about
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5:20 - 5:25the Astroturfing, where we can see deception brought up to scale.
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5:25 - 5:30But actually, what I've been finding is very different from that.
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5:30 - 5:33Now, let's put aside the online anonymous sex chatrooms,
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5:33 - 5:35which I'm sure none of you have been in.
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5:35 - 5:37I can assure you there's deception there.
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5:37 - 5:40And let's put aside the Nigerian prince who's emailed you
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5:40 - 5:43about getting the 43 million out of the country. (Laughter)
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5:43 - 5:45Let's forget about that guy, too.
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5:45 - 5:48Let's focus on the conversations between our friends
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5:48 - 5:50and our family and our coworkers and our loved ones.
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5:50 - 5:52Those are the conversations that really matter.
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5:52 - 5:56What does technology do to deception with those folks?
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5:56 - 6:00Here's a couple of studies. One of the studies we do
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6:00 - 6:03are called diary studies, in which we ask people to record
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6:03 - 6:06all of their conversations and all of their lies for seven days,
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6:06 - 6:10and what we can do then is calculate how many lies took place
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6:10 - 6:13per conversation within a medium, and the finding
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6:13 - 6:15that we get that surprises people the most is that email
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6:15 - 6:18is the most honest of those three media.
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6:18 - 6:21And it really throws people for a loop because we think,
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6:21 - 6:24well, there's no nonverbal cues, so why don't you lie more?
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6:24 - 6:29The phone, in contrast, the most lies.
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6:29 - 6:31Again and again and again we see the phone is the device
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6:31 - 6:35that people lie on the most, and perhaps because of the Butler Lie ambiguities I was telling you about.
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6:35 - 6:39This tends to be very different from what people expect.
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6:39 - 6:43What about résumés? We did a study in which we had
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6:43 - 6:45people apply for a job, and they could apply for a job
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6:45 - 6:49either with a traditional paper résumé, or on LinkedIn,
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6:49 - 6:51which is a social networking site like Facebook,
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6:51 - 6:55but for professionals -- involves the same information as a résumé.
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6:55 - 6:58And what we found, to many people's surprise,
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6:58 - 7:00was that those LinkedIn résumés were more honest
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7:00 - 7:02on the things that mattered to employers, like your
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7:02 - 7:06responsibilities or your skills at your previous job.
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7:06 - 7:09How about Facebook itself?
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7:09 - 7:11You know, we always think that hey, there are these
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7:11 - 7:13idealized versions, people are just showing the best things
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7:13 - 7:15that happened in their lives. I've thought that many times.
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7:15 - 7:18My friends, no way they can be that cool and have good of a life.
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7:18 - 7:22Well, one study tested this by examining people's personalities.
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7:22 - 7:27They had four good friends of a person judge their personality.
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7:27 - 7:28Then they had strangers, many strangers,
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7:28 - 7:31judge the person's personality just from Facebook,
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7:31 - 7:33and what they found was those judgments of the personality
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7:33 - 7:36were pretty much identical, highly correlated,
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7:36 - 7:40meaning that Facebook profiles really do reflect our actual personality.
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7:40 - 7:43All right, well, what about online dating?
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7:43 - 7:44I mean, that's a pretty deceptive space.
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7:44 - 7:48I'm sure you all have "friends" that have used online dating. (Laughter)
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7:48 - 7:50And they would tell you about that guy that had no hair
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7:50 - 7:53when he came, or the woman that didn't look at all like her photo.
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7:53 - 7:56Well, we were really interested in it, and so what we did
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7:56 - 7:59is we brought people, online daters, into the lab,
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7:59 - 8:01and then we measured them. We got their height
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8:01 - 8:05up against the wall, we put them on a scale, got their weight --
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8:05 - 8:09ladies loved that -- and then we actually got their driver's license to get their age.
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8:09 - 8:13And what we found was very, very interesting.
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8:13 - 8:17Here's an example of the men and the height.
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8:17 - 8:19Along the bottom is how tall they said they were in their profile.
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8:19 - 8:24Along the y-axis, the vertical axis, is how tall they actually were.
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8:24 - 8:27That diagonal line is the truth line. If their dot's on it,
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8:27 - 8:29they were telling exactly the truth.
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8:29 - 8:32Now, as you see, most of the little dots are below the line.
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8:32 - 8:35What it means is all the guys were lying about their height.
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8:35 - 8:38In fact, they lied about their height about nine tenths of an inch,
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8:38 - 8:44what we say in the lab as "strong rounding up." (Laughter)
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8:44 - 8:48You get to 5'8" and one tenth, and boom! 5'9".
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8:48 - 8:50But what's really important here is, look at all those dots.
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8:50 - 8:53They are clustering pretty close to the truth. What we found
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8:53 - 8:55was 80 percent of our participants did indeed lie
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8:55 - 8:59on one of those dimensions, but they always lied by a little bit.
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8:59 - 9:02One of the reasons is pretty simple. If you go to a date,
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9:02 - 9:06a coffee date, and you're completely different than what you said,
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9:06 - 9:09game over. Right? So people lied frequently, but they lied
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9:09 - 9:13subtly, not too much. They were constrained.
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9:13 - 9:16Well, what explains all these studies? What explains the fact
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9:16 - 9:20that despite our intuitions, mine included,
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9:20 - 9:24a lot of online communication, technologically-mediated
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9:24 - 9:28communication, is more honest than face to face?
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9:28 - 9:30That really is strange. How do we explain this?
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9:30 - 9:34Well, to do that, one thing is we can look at the deception-detection literature.
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9:34 - 9:38It's a very old literature by now, it's coming up on 50 years.
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9:38 - 9:41It's been reviewed many times. There's been thousands of trials,
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9:41 - 9:45hundreds of studies, and there's some really compelling findings.
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9:45 - 9:48The first is, we're really bad at detecting deception,
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9:48 - 9:52really bad. Fifty-four percent accuracy on average when you have to tell
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9:52 - 9:55if somebody that just said a statement is lying or not.
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9:55 - 9:59That's really bad. Why is it so bad?
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9:59 - 10:01Well it has to do with Pinocchio's nose.
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10:01 - 10:03If I were to ask you guys, what do you rely on
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10:03 - 10:06when you're looking at somebody and you want to find out
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10:06 - 10:09if they're lying? What cue do you pay attention to?
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10:09 - 10:11Most of you would say that one of the cues you look at
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10:11 - 10:14is the eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul.
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10:14 - 10:16And you're not alone. Around the world, almost every culture,
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10:16 - 10:19one of the top cues is eyes. But the research
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10:19 - 10:23over the last 50 years says there's actually no reliable cue
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10:23 - 10:26to deception, which blew me away, and it's one of
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10:26 - 10:28the hard lessons that I learned when I was customs officer.
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10:28 - 10:31The eyes do not tell us whether somebody's lying or not.
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10:31 - 10:34Some situations, yes -- high stakes, maybe their pupils dilate,
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10:34 - 10:37their pitch goes up, their body movements change a little bit,
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10:37 - 10:42but not all the time, not for everybody, it's not reliable.
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10:42 - 10:45Strange. The other thing is that just because you can't see me
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10:45 - 10:48doesn't mean I'm going to lie. It's common sense,
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10:48 - 10:51but one important finding is that we lie for a reason.
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10:51 - 10:53We lie to protect ourselves or for our own gain
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10:53 - 10:56or for somebody else's gain.
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10:56 - 10:58So there are some pathological liars, but they make up
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10:58 - 11:01a tiny portion of the population. We lie for a reason.
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11:01 - 11:03Just because people can't see us doesn't mean
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11:03 - 11:05we're going to necessarily lie.
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11:05 - 11:07But I think there's actually something much more
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11:07 - 11:10interesting and fundamental going on here. The next big
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11:10 - 11:14thing for me, the next big idea, we can find by going
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11:14 - 11:17way back in history to the origins of language.
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11:17 - 11:21Most linguists agree that we started speaking somewhere
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11:21 - 11:24between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That's a long time ago.
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11:24 - 11:27A lot of humans have lived since then.
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11:27 - 11:29We've been talking, I guess, about fires and caves
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11:29 - 11:32and saber-toothed tigers. I don't know what they talked about,
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11:32 - 11:35but they were doing a lot of talking, and like I said,
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11:35 - 11:37there's a lot of humans evolving speaking,
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11:37 - 11:40about 100 billion people in fact.
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11:40 - 11:43What's important though is that writing only emerged
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11:43 - 11:46about 5,000 years ago. So what that means is that
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11:46 - 11:49all the people before there was any writing,
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11:49 - 11:54every word that they ever said, every utterance
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11:54 - 11:59disappeared. No trace. Evanescent. Gone.
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11:59 - 12:03So we've been evolving to talk in a way in which
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12:03 - 12:09there is no record. In fact, even the next big change
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12:09 - 12:12to writing was only 500 years ago now,
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12:12 - 12:14with the printing press, which is very recent in our past,
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12:14 - 12:18and literacy rates remained incredibly low right up until World War II,
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12:18 - 12:22so even the people of the last two millennia,
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12:22 - 12:27most of the words they ever said -- poof! -- disappeared.
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12:27 - 12:30Let's turn to now, the networked age.
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12:30 - 12:35How many of you have recorded something today?
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12:35 - 12:38Anybody do any writing today? Did anybody write a word?
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12:38 - 12:42It looks like almost every single person here recorded something.
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12:42 - 12:45In this room, right now, we've probably recorded more
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12:45 - 12:50than almost all of human pre-ancient history.
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12:50 - 12:53That is crazy. We're entering this amazing period
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12:53 - 12:57of flux in human evolution where we've evolved to speak
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12:57 - 13:00in a way in which our words disappear, but we're in
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13:00 - 13:03an environment where we're recording everything.
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13:03 - 13:05In fact, I think in the very near future, it's not just
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13:05 - 13:07what we write that will be recorded, everything we do
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13:07 - 13:10will be recorded.
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13:10 - 13:14What does that mean? What's the next big idea from that?
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13:14 - 13:19Well, as a social scientist, this is the most amazing thing
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13:19 - 13:22I have ever even dreamed of. Now, I can look at
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13:22 - 13:26all those words that used to, for millennia, disappear.
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13:26 - 13:30I can look at lies that before were said and then gone.
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13:30 - 13:33You remember those Astroturfing reviews that we were
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13:33 - 13:37talking about before? Well, when they write a fake review,
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13:37 - 13:40they have to post it somewhere, and it's left behind for us.
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13:40 - 13:42So one thing that we did, and I'll give you an example of
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13:42 - 13:45looking at the language, is we paid people
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13:45 - 13:48to write some fake reviews. One of these reviews is fake.
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13:48 - 13:50The person never was at the James Hotel.
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13:50 - 13:53The other review is real. The person stayed there.
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13:53 - 13:57Now, your task now is to decide
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13:57 - 14:01which review is fake?
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14:01 - 14:05I'll give you a moment to read through them.
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14:05 - 14:07But I want everybody to raise their hand at some point.
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14:07 - 14:11Remember, I study deception. I can tell if you don't raise your hand.
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14:11 - 14:16All right, how many of you believe that A is the fake?
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14:18 - 14:20All right. Very good. About half.
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14:20 - 14:24And how many of you think that B is?
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14:24 - 14:26All right. Slightly more for B.
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14:26 - 14:29Excellent. Here's the answer.
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14:29 - 14:35B is a fake. Well done second group. You dominated the first group. (Laughter)
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14:35 - 14:38You're actually a little bit unusual. Every time we demonstrate this,
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14:38 - 14:41it's usually about a 50-50 split, which fits
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14:41 - 14:44with the research, 54 percent. Maybe people here
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14:44 - 14:47in Winnipeg are more suspicious and better at figuring it out.
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14:47 - 14:50Those cold, hard winters, I love it.
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14:50 - 14:53All right, so why do I care about this?
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14:53 - 14:56Well, what I can do now with my colleagues in computer science
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14:56 - 15:00is we can create computer algorithms that can analyze
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15:00 - 15:03the linguistic traces of deception.
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15:03 - 15:04Let me highlight a couple of things here
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15:04 - 15:08in the fake review. The first is that liars tend to think
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15:08 - 15:09about narrative. They make up a story:
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15:09 - 15:13Who? And what happened? And that's what happened here.
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15:13 - 15:15Our fake reviewers talked about who they were with
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15:15 - 15:20and what they were doing. They also used the first person singular, I,
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15:20 - 15:22way more than the people that actually stayed there.
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15:22 - 15:27They were inserting themselves into the hotel review,
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15:27 - 15:28kind of trying to convince you they were there.
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15:28 - 15:32In contrast, the people that wrote the reviews that were actually there,
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15:32 - 15:35their bodies actually entered the physical space,
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15:35 - 15:38they talked a lot more about spatial information.
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15:38 - 15:40They said how big the bathroom was, or they said,
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15:40 - 15:45you know, here's how far shopping is from the hotel.
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15:45 - 15:49Now, you guys did pretty well. Most people perform at chance at this task.
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15:49 - 15:52Our computer algorithm is very accurate, much more accurate
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15:52 - 15:55than humans can be, and it's not going to be accurate all the time.
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15:55 - 15:57This isn't a deception-detection machine to tell
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15:57 - 16:00if your girlfriend's lying to you on text messaging.
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16:00 - 16:03We believe that every lie now, every type of lie --
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16:03 - 16:07fake hotel reviews, fake shoe reviews,
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16:07 - 16:10your girlfriend cheating on you with text messaging --
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16:10 - 16:11those are all different lies. They're going to have
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16:11 - 16:14different patterns of language. But because everything's
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16:14 - 16:19recorded now, we can look at all of those kinds of lies.
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16:19 - 16:23Now, as I said, as a social scientist, this is wonderful.
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16:23 - 16:25It's transformational. We're going to be able to learn
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16:25 - 16:29so much more about human thought and expression,
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16:29 - 16:33about everything from love to attitudes,
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16:33 - 16:35because everything is being recorded now, but
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16:35 - 16:38what does it mean for the average citizen?
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16:38 - 16:40What does it mean for us in our lives?
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16:40 - 16:44Well, let's forget deception for a bit. One of the big ideas,
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16:44 - 16:48I believe, is that we're leaving these huge traces behind.
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16:48 - 16:51My outbox for email is massive,
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16:51 - 16:54and I never look at it. I write all the time,
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16:54 - 16:58but I never look at my record, at my trace.
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16:58 - 16:59And I think we're going to see a lot more of that,
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16:59 - 17:02where we can reflect on who we are by looking at
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17:02 - 17:06what we wrote, what we said, what we did.
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17:06 - 17:08Now, if we bring it back to deception, there's a couple
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17:08 - 17:10of take-away things here.
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17:10 - 17:15First, lying online can be very dangerous, right?
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17:15 - 17:17Not only are you leaving a record for yourself on your machine,
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17:17 - 17:22but you're leaving a record on the person that you were lying to,
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17:22 - 17:24and you're also leaving them around for me to analyze
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17:24 - 17:25with some computer algorithms.
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17:25 - 17:28So by all means, go ahead and do that, that's good.
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17:28 - 17:32But when it comes to lying and what we want to do
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17:32 - 17:35with our lives, I think we can go back to
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17:35 - 17:39Diogenes and Confucius. And they were less concerned
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17:39 - 17:41about whether to lie or not to lie, and more concerned about
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17:41 - 17:45being true to the self, and I think this is really important.
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17:45 - 17:49Now, when you are about to say or do something,
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17:49 - 17:53we can think, do I want this to be part of my legacy,
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17:53 - 17:56part of my personal record?
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17:56 - 17:59Because in the digital age we live in now,
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17:59 - 18:03in the networked age, we are all leaving a record.
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18:03 - 18:05Thank you so much for your time,
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18:05 - 18:09and good luck with your record. (Applause)
- Title:
- The future of lying
- Speaker:
- Jeff Hancock
- Description:
-
Who hasn’t sent a text message saying “I’m on my way” when it wasn’t true or fudged the truth a touch in their online dating profile? But Jeff Hancock doesn’t believe that the anonymity of the internet encourages dishonesty. In fact, he says the searchability and permanence of information online may even keep us honest.
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 18:31
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for The future of lying | ||
Thu-Huong Ha approved English subtitles for The future of lying | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for The future of lying | ||
Morton Bast accepted English subtitles for The future of lying | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for The future of lying | ||
Joseph Geni added a translation |