Alejandro Merlan

Learning Outcome #3 conduct systematic inquiry skillfully

Com150 spring 2014
Joint author, contributed to writing the paper as well finding scholarly articles to use

Research into Computer-mediated Communication and Online Deception

Over the course of the research and methodology class, students were asked to form
groups in order to research a topic to give them a first experience into writing and researching an
academic research paper. This research paper went sought to look at why some people lie on the
internet. All students in the class were tasked to prepare a review of literature on their topic, this
requires students to develop skills in inquiry.
In a literature review a student must investigate their topic by analyzing scholarly articles
that are vastly related to their own topic. One Article that went into one aspect of the research
would not be sufficient. Instead, students were tasked to find multiple articles so that they would
have a larger and deeper basis to go off of.
In the research that my partners and I went into, we choose the topic on why people
would lie on the internet. What we found was that computer-mediated communication (CMC)
examined how people communicate on the internet. We did not just use one article on CMC, we
used several, in order to gain a comprehensive knowledge on what CMC is about. We also
contrasted CMC to face to face negotiation, which displayed the difference in how people would
lie standing next to the person as opposed over the internet. At the same time we utilized Social
Information Processing theory as well as social-identity model of communication as being
similar to CMC. What we learned in one article is that the 9-14 year old age group the most
heavily influenced by online relationships, making them the most likely to experience lying on
the Internet. In another article we found that an individual is more likely to lie about his or her
height and weight when it was believed that he or she was not likely to be held accountable.
This information all plays into researching into why people would lie on the internet. In
order to understand that one needs to know about Social Information Processing, Computer
mediated communication and face to face negotiation. By conducting an inquiry into the current

scholarly articles, I gained a better understanding of why people would lie on the internet and at
the same time develop my skills into researching.