“You can't kid a kidder”: association between production and detection of deception in an interactive deception task

Both the ability to deceive others, and the ability to detect deception, has long been proposed to confer an evolutionary advantage. Deception detection has been studied extensively, and the finding that typical individuals fare little better than chance in detecting deception is one of the more robust in the behavioral sciences. Surprisingly, little research has examined individual differences in lie production ability. As a consequence, as far as we are aware, no previous study has investigated whether there exists an association between the ability to lie successfully and the ability to detect lies. Furthermore, only a minority of studies have examined deception as it naturally occurs; in a social, interactive setting. The present study, therefore, explored the relationship between these two facets of deceptive behavior by employing a novel competitive interactive deception task (DeceIT). For the first time, signal detection theory (SDT) was used to measure performance in both the detection and production of deception. A significant relationship was found between the deception-related abilities; those who could accurately detect a lie were able to produce statements that others found difficult to classify as deceptive or truthful. Furthermore, neither ability was related to measures of intelligence or emotional ability. We, therefore, suggest the existence of an underlying deception-general ability that varies across individuals

Smile asymmetries and reputation as reliable indicators of likelihood to cooperate: An evolutionary analysis

Cooperating with individuals whose altruism is not motivated by genuine prosocial emotions could have been costly in ancestral division of labour partnerships. How do humans ‘know’ whether or not an individual has the prosocial emotions committing future cooperation? Frank (1988) has hypothesized two pathways for altruist-detection: (a) facial expressions of emotions signalling character; and (b) gossip regarding the target individual’s reputation. Detecting non-verbal cues signalling commitment to cooperate may be one way to avoid the costs of exploitation. Spontaneous smiles while cooperating may be reliable index cues because of the physiological constraints controlling the neural pathways mediating involuntary emotional expressions. Specifically, it is hypothesized that individuals whose help is mediated by a genuine sympathy will express involuntary smiles (which are observably different from posed smiles). To investigate this idea, 38 participants played dictator games (i.e. a unilateral resource allocation task) against cartoon faces with a benevolent emotional expression (i.e. concern furrows and smile). The faces were presented with information regarding reputation (e.g. descriptions of an altruistic character vs. a non-altruistic character). Half of the sample played against icons with symmetrical smiles (representing a spontaneous smile) while the other half played against asymmetrically smiling icons (representing a posed smile). Icons described as having altruistic motives received more resources than icons described as self-interested helpers. Faces with symmetrical smiles received more resources than faces with asymmetrical smiles. These results suggest that reputation and smile asymmetry influence the likelihood of cooperation and thus may be reliable cues to altruism. These cues may allow for altruists to garner more resources in division of labour situations

Comparing and Combining Lexicase Selection and Novelty Search

Lexicase selection and novelty search, two parent selection methods used in evolutionary computation, emphasize exploring widely in the search space more than traditional methods such as tournament selection. However, lexicase selection is not explicitly driven to select for novelty in the population, and novelty search suffers from lack of direction toward a goal, especially in unconstrained, highly-dimensional spaces. We combine the strengths of lexicase selection and novelty search by creating a novelty score for each test case, and adding those novelty scores to the normal error values used in lexicase selection. We use this new novelty-lexicase selection to solve automatic program synthesis problems, and find it significantly outperforms both novelty search and lexicase selection. Additionally, we find that novelty search has very little success in the problem domain of program synthesis. We explore the effects of each of these methods on population diversity and long-term problem solving performance, and give evidence to support the hypothesis that novelty-lexicase selection resists converging to local optima better than lexicase selection

The adaptive problem of absent third-party punishment

Language is a uniquely human behaviour, which has presented unique adaptive problems. Prominent among these is the transmission of information that may affect an individual’s reputation. The possibility of punishment of those with a low reputation by absent third parties has created a selective pressure on human beings that is not shared by any other species. This has led to the evolution of unique cognitive structures that are capable of handling such a novel adaptive challenge. One of these, we argue, is the propositional theory of mind, which enables individuals to model, and potentially manipulate, their own reputation in the minds of other group members, by representing the beliefs that others have about the first party’s intentions and actions. Support for our theoretical model is provided by an observational study on tattling in two preschools, and an experimental study of giving under threat of gossip in a dictator game

An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Deception and Telling Lies

A lie is an expression at deviance with the truth known or honestly believed by someone with an intention to deceive others for certain purpose, social or personal. An ability to lie might be evolutionary in nature possibly to help in survival, since it is found in the non-human world also. In the biological perspective, each individual is at war against all others. Thus viewed, lies are the cardinal virtues for survival and, by implication, the carriers of evolution. In the human world, lying is morally blameworthy in a relatively un-obscure way. There may be cases of lying to which it may be difficult to take up a definite moral attitude. Certain types of lies might be morally acceptable and socially beneficial since they may block the otherwise (most damaging) global optimum solution of a negative sum game, while other types of lies are ethically and socially deplorable as they might block the optimal solution of a cooperative game. This must be judged pragmatically with the overall social welfare that they entail or produce.Lies; morality; economics of lies; Taxonomy; survival; evolution; information asymmetry; gender and lies

Deception in Group Contexts

Unethical behavior is often viewed as an individual-level phenomenon. However, group membership can influence individuals’ choices to behave ethically or not (Messick, 2006). This chapter discusses whether and when groups will be more likely than individuals to use deception. We focus on three areas of research. The first involves comparing individuals and groups in mixed-motive situations, and the discontinuity between individual and group responses to economic games: individuals tend to cooperate while groups tend to compete (Wildschut, Pinter, Veva, Insko, & Schopler, 2003). In terms of deception, this is interesting as both individuals and groups initially cooperate. We discuss explanations for the effect and their relation to why groups use deception. Second, we focus on general differences between individual and group deception. Deception can be beneficial when negotiating, and groups tend to use deception to their benefit (Cohen, Gunia, Kim-Jun, & Murnighan, 2009; Sutter, 2009). We discuss explanations for these effects and provide a framework for understanding when and why groups use deception

Situational and Dispositional Determinants of Intentional Deceiving

Does opportunity make the thief or are people dispositionally prone to deceive? The interaction between personality and the circumstances surrounding deception is crucial to understand what promotes dishonesty in our society. Due to its inherent spontaneity and sociality, deceptive behaviour may be hardly reproducible in experimental settings. We developed a novel paradigm in the form of an interactive game where participants can choose whether to lie to another person in situations of loss vs. gain, and of no-reputation-risk vs. reputation-risk linked to the disclosure of their deceptive behaviour to others. Thus, our ecological paradigm allowed subjects to spontaneously decide when to lie and face the challenge of deceiving others. In the case of loss, participants lied to reverse the outcome in their favour. Deception was lower in the reputation-risk condition where personality traits concerning social interactions also played an important role

Group-Oriented Values, Rules and Cooperation

collectivism, cooperation, economic development, game theory, individualism, institutions, conflicts