previous post reposted

from jooliyah, originally presented as a comment on another post, re-presented here for easier reading and commenting:

-What are the audience's interests in the topic?

The author used the title, “Looking for the Lies,” caught my attention as well as it may catch the audience’s attention if they’re interested to know what the title means. I didn’t expect the author to mention about devices to detect the lies. It was interesting to learn how each equipment such as MRI, ECG, polygraph, etc function to detect the lies. However they’re not 100% reliable. As I was reading this article, I think to myself, would I want to trust any of those devices. Probably not, because it’s like a robot is detecting your lies and it makes me feel uncomfortable if I have to go through that. What if you are telling the truth, but the “robot” detects that you’re lying. How can you defense toward to that? Especially in the court, the judge would probably listen to the “robot.” That means it gives you more work to prove the judge that you’re telling the truth. So I just find this as hassle. People are researching many different things trying to find how to detect a lie. That didn’t really get me interested that much because I’m not a technology person. However, the audience may be interested in learning different equipment on how to detect a lie. It just depends on the reader’s interest.

Nevertheless, why do people lie got my attention. It makes me wonder why do people lie. Is it because they’re afraid that some people might get mad at them for telling the truth. Telling a lie is easier than telling the truth, however it’s hard to keep track of the lies that you’ve been telling to. People tell lies for reasons such as not wanting to hurt their friends’ feelings, not their business to know, and/or not wanting to cause problems, etc. Telling lies constant may hurt friendship. Moreover, other questions such as how often do people lie? To whom do they tell their lies? Can people tell when others are lying?

On page 54, I seem to agree with Paul Ekman’s perspective on lying. He mentioned, “lying is a matter of privacy,” for instance “if his wife or two grown children want to lie to him, that’s their business: they haven’t given me the right to call them on their lies.” It’s true that it’s their business to lie. They must have a reason why they do that. I even lied to my parents for own reasons because sometime I don’t want them to know or something like that. It’s okay to tell lies once in a while, but not everyday which that’d consider you as a pathological liar.

This is a bit off point from this article, I was surfing on the Internet about lying and I found an article related to lying. In the article, Almost Everyone Lies, Often Seeing It as a Kindness by Shankar Vedantam, “Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every 10 minutes, with some people getting in as many as a dozen falsehoods in that period. More interestingly -- and Libby might see this as the silver lining if he is found guilty -- Feldman also found that liars tend to be more popular than honest people.” I agree with Feldman about liars being more popular than honest people. People who tell honest all the time make them look like nerds. I don’t know why this is like that. For example, my mom is an honest person, she always tells me that she was always the odd one in the group and didn’t have many friends.


-What does the article hope to accomplish with its audience? 

It’s interesting to learn that some kind of equipment that can read oxygen levels in the brain or see the white part in the brain to detect the lies. It’s interesting when Professor Mazzolini brought up about DNA testing in the future, it’ll be interesting to research about that to see if DNA could detect the lies. Would it be more accuracy than any kinds of devices?


-What political, scientific or humanistic concerns does the article speak to that the audience might have (or form) opinions about? 

On Feb. 19, 2006 Pat Costa of Gaston, Ore. wrote in the New Yorker Magazine: I can envision, a decade or so from now, the next iPod-like gadget: a pair of glasses with a built-in lie detector that flashes ''He's lying!'' as a floating subtitle just below the person you are watching. This science-imitating-art device would be quite useful when talking with a suitor (''I like you'' He's lying; ''I love you'' He's really lying). Such a device would also be handy when talking with a car salesperson (''It gets 40 m.p.g. on the highway'' Sure, maybe downhill, with a tailwind), stockbrokers (''Everybody I have talked to is buying this stock'' You're the only person he talked to) and real-estate agents (''This is the hottest market in the state'' Did I hear a bubble burst?).