TY - GEN
T1 - Butler lies
T2 - 27th International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2009
AU - Hancock, Jeff
AU - Birnholtz, Jeremy
AU - Bazarova, Natalya
AU - Guillory, Jamie
AU - Perlin, Josh
AU - Amos, Barrett
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - Instant messaging (IM) is a common and popular way for co-workers, friends, and family to stay in touch, but its "always-on" properties can sometimes lead people to feel overexposed or too readily available to others for conversation. This, in turn, may lead people to deceive others about their actual status or availability. In this paper, we introduce the notion of the "butler lie" to describe lies that allow for polite initiation and termination of conversations. We present results from a field study of 50 IM users, in which participants rated each of their messages at the time of sending to indicate whether or not it was deceptive. About one tenth of all IM messages were rated as lies and, of these, about one fifth were butler lies. These results suggest that butler lies are an important social practice in IM, and that existing approaches to interpersonal awareness, which focus on accurate assessment of availability, may need to take deception and other social practices into account.
AB - Instant messaging (IM) is a common and popular way for co-workers, friends, and family to stay in touch, but its "always-on" properties can sometimes lead people to feel overexposed or too readily available to others for conversation. This, in turn, may lead people to deceive others about their actual status or availability. In this paper, we introduce the notion of the "butler lie" to describe lies that allow for polite initiation and termination of conversations. We present results from a field study of 50 IM users, in which participants rated each of their messages at the time of sending to indicate whether or not it was deceptive. About one tenth of all IM messages were rated as lies and, of these, about one fifth were butler lies. These results suggest that butler lies are an important social practice in IM, and that existing approaches to interpersonal awareness, which focus on accurate assessment of availability, may need to take deception and other social practices into account.
KW - Computer-mediated communication
KW - Deception
KW - Instant messaging
KW - Interpersonal awareness
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77950902501&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=77950902501&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1518701.1518782
DO - 10.1145/1518701.1518782
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:77950902501
SN - 9781605582474
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
SP - 517
EP - 526
BT - CHI 2009
Y2 - 4 April 2009 through 9 April 2009
ER -