Our group consists of five students from all three universities: Leslie and Xinyu from the Bauhaus-University Weimar, Julia from University of Augsburg and Tim and Julia from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. We first met each other in this practical course across our universities and are very happy to do such a project! But enough about us, you will probably ask yourself, what is this blog about?
The whole practical course is about hidden data and so is this blog post with our first results in this project! Nowadays there is an uncountable amount of data and information in our daily life. The interesting thing about this is, that despite this amount of data, there is still some information and data which we are not aware of, or we don’t know how to track it yet – Hidden Data! That’s why we decided to brainstorm about such data and what you can do with it. So, at the end of the brainstorming we decided to focus on lies in our daily life for our project and this is what this blog is about! Nearly everybody is lying in his daily life, even if it is just a normal answer to the question “How are you today?”. Often the answer is “Good” even if you feel bad at this moment. We wanted to know if there is more behind these lies. Where do we lie? When do we lie? To whom do we lie? Is it possible to differentiate lies? What will happen if a lie gets detected? Will the communication change if lies would always be detected and how? Is it ethically acceptable to detect lies? Would it be good or necessary at all to know the truth and if so, when would it be good? And the most interesting question: Why do we lie? All these questions will be explored and discussed in this blog.
The whole project started with brainstorming on hidden data in collocated inter human communications! We decided to focus on the context “relationships and friendships”. There we had ideas like the amount of love/affection for another person and the degree of annoyance, which both can be categorized to the emotion you feel while communicating. Another idea was the sarcasm in the subtext of a message, both verbal and text messages.
In our opinion the most interesting topic was the truthfulness of a sentence, because there are so many things to explore as described in the further section.
After deciding on this topic, we thought about which inter-human communication we want to focus on and where it could be interesting to detect lies. First, we had the idea to go with a more formal scenario like in court between a judge and a witness. There it could be very important to detect lies, but there lie detectors are usually not admissible as evidence, because the lie detection is based on physiological data, which can also occur due to other events [1].
Then we thought, it would be much more interesting to focus on daily-life communications and actions, i.e., in a relationship or friendship between two humans. In this context we came up with all the questions in the section before.
After we decided in which scenario we wanted to track the data, we were wondering how we could track this data and especially which data to focus on. Therefore, we brainstormed about different dimensions, which could be interesting to know while lying. These dimensions can be found in the following picture:
As you can see, there are many dimensions which could be relevant to know when lying. With these dimensions we started tracking data. Because this topic is very personal and individual, we decided to track the data all by ourselves. We had many ways to track the data: Some of us used the notice-app in their smartphone, others used PowerPoint or an Excel to write down their lies and the dimensions. Some did it shortly after lying, some in the evening reflecting the day. A few days into the tracking we realized that this topic is very self-reflecting and allows us to get deep personal insights. We had some difficulties, because we were somehow our own participants and were maybe shocked how much we lie in our daily life, even if these are just some small basic lies you normally don’t realize.
After one week of tracking lies and their different dimensions we met again and reflected our tracking process. We all had enough data to start visualizing the lies. We had many different ideas on how we could design a postcard based on the tracked data. All our postcards you can see in the following pictures.
The next task is the investigation of different materials and their properties. The results of this investigation and the use of these materials for our project, we will describe in our next blog post.
[1] https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/is-a-polygraph-test-admissible-as-evidence-31737