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Is This How We (All) Do It?: Butler Lies and Ambiguity Through a Broader Lens

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The ubiquity of mobile devices has resulted in more opportunities to interact with more people than ever before. Given a finite capacity for interaction with others, people commonly manage their availability by limiting others' access to them. Prior work has demonstrated the importance of doing so in a relationally sensitive way and identified the butler lie, in which deception is used to manage availability, as a common linguistic strategy. Two key limitations of existing exploratory work, however, are limited samples of primarily students and a focus on media properties in understanding ambiguity that enables butler lies to be plausible. This paper aims to address these issues via a broad field study of deception and butler lies using a novel message-sampling method employed via a custom mobile app. Results show clear evidence of butler lies occurring in a broader population, with some gender differences; and urge adoption of a multi-level framework for understanding ambiguity that also includes private information and infrastructure-level attributes of interaction media.

References

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Aoki, P. & Woodruff, A. Making spaces for stories: Ambiguity in the design of personal communication. Proc. ACM CHI (2005), 181--190.
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Birnholtz, J., Reynolds, L., Smith, M. & Hancock, J. (2013). "Everyone has to do it:" A join action approach to managing social inattention. Computers in Human Behavior, 29, 2230--2238.
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Birnholtz, J., Guillory, J., Hancock, J., & Bazarova, N. "on my way": Deceptive texting and interpersonal awareness narratives. Proc. ACM CSCW (2010), 1--4.
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DePaulo, B., Kashy, D., Kirkendol, S., Wyer, & Epstein, J. (1996). Lying in everyday life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 979--995.
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Hancock, J., Thom-Santelli, J., & Ritchie, T. Deception and design: The impact of communication technology on lying behavior. Proc. ACM CHI (2004), 129--134.
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Harper, R. & Taylor, S. Glancephone -- an exploration of human expression. Proc. ACM MobileHCI (2009), 24--32.
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Ling, R. (2004). The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
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Reynolds, L. Smith, M, Birnholtz, J., & Hancock, J. Butler lies from both sides: Actions and perception of unavailability management in texting. Proc. ACM CSCW (2013), 769--778.
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Zickuhr, K., & Smith, A. (2012). Digital differences. Pew Internet & American Life Project, 13.

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  1. Is This How We (All) Do It?: Butler Lies and Ambiguity Through a Broader Lens

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    4290 pages
    ISBN:9781450331456
    DOI:10.1145/2702123
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 18 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. availability
    2. butler lies
    3. cmc
    4. deception
    5. texting

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    CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

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    CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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