5: Building a Relationship to Deceive

Nothing ever happens in the town that I grew up in. It is a small suburb of Long Island with limited excitement. However, my senior year in high school there was quite the scandal that shocked nearly everyone as it was covered on every news station. We were all surprised to learn that a father of two children in my school had arranged over the internet to meet with who he thought was a thirteen-year old girl. “She” turned out to be an undercover investigator who had been following him from the start and eventually arrested him at their supposed meeting spot. In this case it appeared that while one person thought he was building a relationship, the other was actually strategically deceiving him by feigning his age, gender, and interest in the relationship.

Though the predator and the investigator met in a chatroom, they continued their “sexually explicit” dialogue through e-mails over a six week period. According to the feature-based model of deception, the predator was clearly not contemplating the recordability of their exchanges. Given that he was able to move their conversation from chatroom to e-mail to ensure it was recorded, we can assume that this investigator was highly trained in deception, and therefore easily able to string this man along into believing that he was in fact a young girl. His job requires that he is highly motivated to use identity-based deception. According to Hancock’s study on deception and motivation, the more motivated one is to deceive, the more likely he or she will be successful. This is a scary thought in imagining the effectiveness of child predators, yet in this case the tables were turned. The motivation factor was clearly very effective in the investigator’s deceit as their relationship developed so much that by the time they picked a time and place to meet, the predator was fully unaware that he was talking to anyone other than a teenage girl. Though one would think that the intelligent man that this predator is would be skeptical, the truth bias, or our human nature to believe, dilutes this possibility.

McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors absolutely played a role in its growth of this six week relationship. The medium of online space in which this “bond” developed, would never have occurred in a series of face to face interactions. It is likely that her theory of increased self-disclosure as a result of increased anonymity and identifiability aided in their relationship. Known as the “stranger in the crowd effect,” this man would never have spoken in such a way to who he thought was a young girl in person. However, online it likely felt like they were hidden and that no one would find out about their secret relationship; so he thought. His public self-awareness likely decreased, which means that thoughts of what his family and friends would think of him had absolved the inhibition he would have in a richer media. The elimination of gate features, according to McKenna, or the features that would impede a relationship in person, are removed in internet space. If this meeting occurred in person, the predator would have clearly known that he was talking to another man, not a young girl and thus the relationship would not have proceeded from there.

An important correlation seems to exist between deception and relationships. One person in this situation thought that he was building a relationship. The other person, in contrast, had deception as his main intention. To deceive this man effectively meant first giving him the idea that they were truly developing a relationship and he was actually attracted to and interested in him. He would have to take advantage of the factors that Wallace describes, especially in the areas of common ground and disinhibition. Through the laws of attraction, or the proportion of shared attitudes and beliefs, the investigator could give him the notion that they had a lot in common within their limited interaction. Additionally, the principle of social equity demonstrates that the more the investigator self-disclosed, the more likely this man would be to share information about himself. To deceive, the building of a foundation relationship may be essential. They seem to go hand in hand, and in this case, were extremely effective in preventing what could have been a very scary situation.