Truth, Trust, and Tech

Catalog description

(Graduate students enroll in COMM 224. COMM 124 is offered for 5 units, COMM 224 is offered for 4 units.) Deception is one of the most significant and pervasive social phenomena of our age. Lies range from the trivial to the very serious, including deception between friends and family, in the workplace, and in security and intelligence contexts. At the same time, information and communication technologies have pervaded almost all aspects of human communication, from everyday technologies that support interpersonal interactions to, such as email and instant messaging, to more sophisticated systems that support organization-level interactions. Given the prevalence of both deception and communication technology in our personal and professional lives, an important set of questions have recently emerged about how humans adapt their deceptive practices to new communication and information technologies, including how communication technology affects the practice of lying and the detection of deception, and whether technology can be used to identify deception.