Truth Telling and Deception in the Internet Society

Abstract

It is argued that mass deployment and use of high-capacity electronic communication has caused the breakdown of a human institution so elementary that nobody in the past bothered to make laws protecting it: the everyday give-and-take of speech. It has done this by vastly increasing people’s power to deceive without, at the same time, increasing their power to detect deception. The reason the imbalance is so problematic is that speech is an economic act, something done by the speaker to achieve some gain or personal benefit and involving exchange of value with the listener. Speech is therefore not inherently truthful. It becomes truthful, if at all, only when the speaker is afraid of being branded as a liar or a fool if found out, but, at the same time, not too afraid to speak out in the first place. Modern electronic means have provided speakers with a huge arsenal of tools to evade personal responsibility for what they say, thus badly unbalancing the economics of speech. Fortunately, the cure is simple: one need only create institutions that circumscribe this power in just the right amount so as to restore balance. In this paper I describe experiments I have conducted in creating such institutions using cohorts of students in coursework. I have found that a carefully crafted electronic interface that enforces the right amount of transparency, together with a small amount of human intervention, can have a startlingly positive effect on behavior. No policing is required. Creativity and intellectual cooperation bloom automatically and massively when healthy economic interactions among the people in the cohort are restored.