Acts of Deception

The second dimension is labeled covertness: Notice that the concept lie is located at the bottom right-hand corner of the figure. The subjects agreed in rating lying as harmful, socially unacceptable, and immoral, as well as being highly verbal and direct. Deception also is high on harmfulness but is relatively neutral on the covertness dimension.

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This suggests that the subjects recognize that some deceptions can be highly verbal, such as lying, but that they can also be nonverbal. Although fib and whopper are near lie on the covertness dimension, they are rated as relatively neutral on the harmfulness scale.

A white lie is rated as only somewhat harmless and somewhat overt. There are some possible limitations of these data.

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The variations among the terms are circumscribed by the limited number and range of. Some important dimensions in the folk psychology of deception may have been left out. A more important limitation is that the role of context is omitted. Disguise is rated as neutral on harmfulness though covert, but a disguise used for a costume party is quite different from a disguise used to rob a bank.

Perhaps the apparently neutral rating simply reflects that some respondents rated it as harmful and others rated it as neutral. Similarly, most jokes are harmless, but certain practical jokes can be quite cruel and harmful. Despite these limitations, however, Hopper and Bell's data probably capture some important aspects about how undergraduates in our culture perceive deception. Presumably, if such subjects were telling a lie as a joke, they would display less leakage than if they were telling a lie about who wrote their term paper.

We have illustrated this procedure in some detail because we believe that, with suitable refinements, it can be used to yield psychological spaces for different subgroups and cultures. We might expect that different groups would differ on which kinds of deception they placed at the socially acceptable and socially unacceptable ends of the harmfulness dimension. This could be useful information, for example, if leakage cues to deception mainly occur when an individual is deceiving in a way that his or her culture finds socially unacceptable. Another way to uncover the psychological space with respect to deception was illustrated by Coleman and Kay These authors carried out their empirical study of the word lie as an assault on the previously dominant checklist theories of meaning.

The checklist view assumes that the meaning of a word consists of a set of features: For example, bachelor refers to any object that is human, adult, male, unmarried. According to the checklist theory, any person who possesses all four of these defining features is a bachelor, and a person who lacks one or more of these features is not a bachelor.

The classic theory of meaning asserts that the possession of these defining features is both necessary and sufficient for being a bachelor. Such a definition establishes what is called an equivalence class—every person who satisfies the definition is as much a bachelor as every other bachelor. Even before this classical theory began to be challenged in the s, some scholars had pointed to problems with the classical definition.

For example, is the Pope a bachelor? What about a widower? The alternative view of meaning, which became popular during the s, is known as the prototype theory. Much of the early work supporting this theory had been done with colors Rosch, Not all examples of the color red, say, are equal. People in different cultures agree that some examples are better reds than others. Additional experimental work dealing with directly perceptible objects such as plants, animals, utensils, and furniture supported the prototype theory. Coleman and Kay wanted to show that the prototype phenomenon can also be found in words referring to less concrete things, such as the speech-act word lie.

A good lie is one for which the speaker S asserts some proposition P to addressee A such that:.

In the checklist or classical theory these three properties would be necessary and sufficient for a statement to be a lie. Statements that possess all three properties would be the best examples of a lie. Statements that possessed only two of the three defining properties might still be considered lies, but not very good examples. Statements that had only one of the properties would be considered even poorer examples of lies.

Finally, statements that possessed none of these three properties would not be considered as lies. Coleman and Kay conducted an empirical test of the theory by constructing brief stories to correspond with each of the eight possible combinations of possessing or not possessing the property. The story corresponding to the possession of all three properties was as follows p. Moe has eaten the cake Juliet was intending to serve to company. The story corresponding to the possession of none of three defining properties was p.

Dick, John, and H. As expected, all 67 of Coleman and Kay's American subject's agreed that 1 was a lie and that 2 was not a lie. What they were interested in was how these respondents would react to the other stories, which. Story 3 , for example, had two defining characteristics: It lacked the property that S believes P to be false.

This story was as follows p. Pigfat believes he has to pass the candy store to get to the pool hall, but he is wrong about this because the candy store has moved. Pigfat's mother doesn't approve of pool. As he is going out the door intending to go to the pool hall, Pigfat's mother asks him where is going. Pigfat's statement was considered to be a lie by 58 percent of the judges; 37 percent judged it not to be a lie; and 5 percent could not make a decision. The more defining properties a story contained, the more likely it was to be judged a lie.

The authors noted some minor departures from the ordering that their theory would have predicted. In part, these departures could be attributed to the fact that each story differed in content. Coleman and Kay also obtained comments from their subjects. In agreement with their theory, the comments referred to the three prototypical properties to justify why a statement was judged as a lie. But the subjects also referred to other properties, such as the reprehensibility of the acts and the motives of the person making the statement. The authors discuss their reasons for not including some of these additional properties in the prototype for lie.

They distinguish between prototypical and typical properties of a concept. Lies, in their view, are prototypically statements that the speaker believes to be false, intends the hearer to believe, and are, in fact, false. Lies are also typically reprehensible, but not prototypically so.

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They conclude Coleman and Kay, Although this is not the only plausible way to do so, we summarize our observations by saying that reprehensibleness, although characteristic of typical acts of lying, is not a prototypical property of such acts, and as such does not play a role in the semantic prototype or in the meaning of lie. This distinction between prototypical and typical properties of a concept is controversial.

We do not take a side in this controversy; we discuss the issue here because, regardless of whether reprehensibility is a prototypical or typical property of lying, it may matter for the leakage hypothesis. Only acts that are reprehensible or otherwise morally unacceptable to a given individual would be expected to lead to those states that generate nonverbal leakage. To gain an understanding of how different cultural groups construe various types of lying and deception, the Coleman and Kay approach should be extended by adding stories that also vary on such properties as perceived social acceptability, potential harmfulness, and the like.

Sweetser uses the data from Coleman and Kay's investigation to provide an alternative interpretation. Like Hopper and Bell, Sweetser wants to describe the folk theory or conception of lying; unlike Hopper and Bell, her method is linguistic rather than psychological. Sweetser notes the view of concepts as fuzzy sets rather than classical equivalence classes, but she argues for a different account.

She suggests that within folk psychology, the classical view may actually hold. She claims that the folk definition of lying holds for a prototypical, simplified model of the world. This prototypical world contains maxims such as: In this prototypical context, if the speaker's statement is false, then it is clearly a lie. When subjects are not completely sure whether a speaker is lying, Sweetser argues that this is not because the specific act differs from the prototypical lie, but rather the act occurs in a context that differs from the prototypical one.

A joke is a false statement deliberately uttered by the speaker. It is not clearly a lie, according to Sweetser, because the context in which the joke is made differs from the prototypical one. In the prototypical context for defining a lie, conveying true information is paramount.

The 13 Greatest Acts of Deception in Military History

But in the context of a joke, playing is paramount, and conveying true information is irrelevant. Subjects are unsure about whether a joke is a lie because they are not sure that a lie can occur in a context in which the truth is irrelevant. Sweetser's analysis of lying highlights the need to keep context in mind when devising a taxonomy of deception. Indeed, we believe that an adequate taxonomy of deception will include a taxonomy of the contexts in which each kind of deceptive act can occur.

Sweetser's analysis points to a further issue that may be important for a good taxonomy. She states that a speaker feels less immoral if he or she manages to deceive the target without directly lying. She suggests that deceivers feel less guilt about deceiving by implication rather than by deceiving by an explicitly false claim. In contrast, she also suggests that a victim feels more resentment by having been deceived by implication than by a direct lie.

If Sweetser is correct, then it could be hypothesized that a deceiver is less likely to leak deceptive signals when engaging in indirect deception than in direct deception. Implications for this hypothesis are derived from the Druckman et al. These investigators found both similarities and differences in displayed nonverbal behaviors between. Discriminant-analysis results showed that the evaders were more similar to deceivers than to honest subjects in overall displays. However, the evaders could be distinguished from deceivers in terms of particular nonverbal behaviors displayed during certain time periods and as deviations from baseline data: These findings suggest that evaders are not less likely to leak deceptive signals; rather, different cues may be leaked by indirect evaders and direct deceivers.

The cross-cultural question is intriguing. Several interesting suggestions are made in the anthropological, linguistic, and other related literatures. A first reading of the literatures provides a pessimistic answer to the possibility of finding universal indicators of deception. Some cultures seem to have notions of what constitutes lying and deception that differ markedly from American folklore.

Even more disquieting is the claim that in some cultures lying and deceiving, in several contexts, are not only socially acceptable, but actually considered exemplary behavior when the fabrications succeed. The reason these first impressions of cross-cultural differences are disheartening is because of the assumption that a deceiver will only leak his or her intentions when knowingly deceiving and violating a social taboo.

Thus, one faces the task of finding out what is considered a socially unacceptable fabrication within various cultural groups. Once such contexts have been discovered, then interrogations could be arranged so as to put informants, for example, in a situation in which they would be violating a cultural taboo if they lied when presenting information to interrogators. Our reading of the literature indicates that if a socially unacceptable deception for a given informant has been identified, then circumstances can be created that will lead to leakage if the informant is willfully lying.

Our focus has been on a folk psychology of deception because it seems to offer the best way to achieve a general theory of deception. The leakage hypothesis assumes that a given individual will display potentially detectable signs when he or she is in a certain psychological state. As we have noted, a key issue is the extent to which these diagnostic cues are universal—that is, to what extent they show the same pattern across cultures and situations—and the evidence to date suggests the possibility that there may be both universal and culturally specific aspects to leakage displays.

Presumably, the underlying psychological state that gives rise to leakage corresponds to what is ordinarily labeled guilt, shame, humiliation, disgrace, or dishonor—terms that refer to how people feel when they violate a social taboo. Everyone is raised within family and cultural settings that teach which acts are socially unacceptable. This socialization process is considered to impart a relatively permanent tendency to experience guilt or a similar state whenever a person commits, or even considers committing, social transgressions.

Such tendencies may persevere even when an individual, as an adult, consciously rejects many of the values within which he or she was raised.



One assumption, then, is that for all cultures people will react with a guilty state when they believe they are violating a cultural norm. Knowing the folk psychology for various cultures becomes important if one wants to know what constitutes a cultural taboo for a given individual. That is why the techniques used by Hopper and Bell and by Coleman and Kay have been discussed in some detail. By properly refining and adapting their methods, information can be gathered on how individuals from various cultures and subcultures conceive of deception and lying.

This information, in turn, might lead to determining what sorts of stories or actions constitute socially unacceptable behaviors. Such findings could then be used to create appropriate stimuli that may elicit leakage if the individual is, in fact, trying to deceive. This model assumes people have been socialized. What about individuals who have not been socialized? In the past, psychologists and psychiatrists diagnosed some individuals as psychopaths or sociopaths. A few experiments have been carried out with such persons using the polygraph; all of them are controversial and the results are contradictory.

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It is doubtful, for example, that an intelligence agent would want to trust a person so diagnosed, even if such a person could successfully deceive the enemy. The discussion in this chapter and in Chapter 9 deals with the simplest situation in which deception occurs, a face-to-face confrontation between two individuals, in part because this situation has been the context of most of the research.

Another reason is that such a situation. The typical dyadic situation is one in which the two individuals interact and each adapts his or her behavior in the light of what the other person says and does. In contrast, all the research on the leakage hypothesis has been conducted within a relatively static, noninteractive mode.

Typically, the detector makes judgments in response to a videotaped presentation. The detector cannot continue and ask further questions, nor can the deceiver adjust his or her behavior on the basis of feedback from the detector. But this is just the context in which ordinary dyadic communication occurs. It is possible that a detector can do better than the dismal performances so far reported if he or she is allowed to actually interact with the sender. However, the sender might actually do even better at hiding deception in an interactive mode, because the deceiver can use feedback from the victim to adjust both the content and mode of presentation so as to be more acceptable to the victim.

The detector's challenge is to determine the significance of a cue when he or she knows that the sender is managing his or her expressions. The detector must anticipate what the subject expects him or her to look for and then focus attention on other cues. The sender is challenged by the need to fool the detector when he or she knows that the detector is assessing his or her moves. The sender must anticipate the cues likely to be used by the observer and then control them. The objective for each is to minimize his or her vulnerability under difficult circumstances.

This assessment dilemma renders the expression game a highly sophisticated art form. The dynamics of the expression game pose an analytical problem. Both senders encoders and receivers decoders determine the outcome of the communication process. The problem is one of disentangling effects of senders and receivers. Accurate detection may be the result of encoding skill, decoding skill, or both. Consequently, an analyst does not know whether detection is due to style of presentation or astute observation. One solution is to control part of the interaction, either the.

By so doing, however, one may lose the essential features of an interactive situation. This problem illustrates the difficulties in making the transition between laboratory and field settings. Theories of deception, such as those outlined in Epstein , often assume deception works best when it can be tailored to the expectations and desires of the victim.

Intelligence agencies attempt to do this tailoring by using feedback about which parts of the disinformation are being accepted and which parts are being rejected by the victim. One source of such feedback is provided by information gained in face-to-face communication between informant and interrogator. In the world of spying, however, the most effective form of feedback comes from an inside person or mole who has penetrated the target agency. The deception loop includes several layers of an organization.

The disinformation lying from a presumed informer makes its way from the controlling agent up through the various layers of the bureaucracy. The inside person sees how this information is being accepted and interpreted and informs the enemy agency. The enemy agency, in turn, adjusts the disinformation being provided by the informant to better fit with the expectations and desires of the enemy.

As this example illustrates, deception can and often does involve several levels of organizational complexity. A complete understanding of how deception operates in most real-world situations often requires considerations at several levels of analysis such as the international scene, the relation between states, governmental structures, internal special interest groups, and the like Handel, ; Mauer et al. Much of this complexity deals with how information is accepted and used or not. This, in turn, relates to the problem of detecting deception because it is possible that even when cues to deception should be obvious to an interrogator, the disinformation being provided may so fit in with preconceptions and desires of superiors that the interrogator subconsciously ignores all the signs to the contrary.

As many have pointed out, an interrogator case officer who controls an informant has much of his esteem and pride invested in this informant. A symbiotic relationship exists between a case officer and an informant. The informant requires the trust of the case officer so that the information being provided will be accepted. The case officer needs to believe that the informant is trustworthy because his or her reputation depends on controlling this important source of information.

In fact, even when an informant is a plant, he or she will make sure to provide. In this way the case officer becomes even more dependent on the trustworthiness of the informant. Once a case officer and his or her superiors have decided that an informant is trustworthy, the dynamics of the situation are tilted toward maintaining the belief in the reliability of the informant.

Careers can be made, or broken, if the agency ultimately decides that an informant was a true defector or a plant. A variety of institutional and psychological factors come into play to maintain the belief, even in the face of subsequently strong information to the contrary, in the trustworthiness of the agent. Striking cases of such institutional self-deception have been documented by Epstein , Handel , Watzlawick , and Whaley Such institutional self-deception typically involves accepting or rejecting the content of information.

At the level of face-to-face communication, we have been focusing on the nonverbal cues rather than the content of what is being communicated. The two bases for judging the credibility of information obviously interact. When the content of the information is consistent with the beliefs and desires of the receiver, then the tendency to accept the information as accurate is strong. As noted above, the relationship between suspicion and detection accuracy —how much a tendency to believe or disbelieve can override the ability to pick up deception cues—is important for research.

From the discussion in the chapter we draw four conclusions. The first conclusion is based on the assumption that leaked cues to deception occur when an individual's psychological state reflects the experience of guilt. However, the situations that produce guilt may vary with an individual's cultural background and experience. Therefore, detection of deception would be improved if one could anticipate the sorts of settings that constitute social transgression or a guilt-producing state for particular individuals.

The research on the folk psychology of deception and on the prototypical structure of lying are examples of methods for assessing perceptions of socially unacceptable deceptions within subcultural groups. With suitable refinements, those methods can be used to discover what stories and deceptive acts might induce leakage for particular individuals. Once discovered, the stories could be varied systematically to determine whether leakage occurs or is enhanced when an individual deceives under conditions that violate his or her cultural norms.

Deception (criminal law)

The analysis would compare the reactions of various cultural groups to the. Our second conclusion about cultural differences has practical implications. An interrogator can arrange a situation that will violate a cultural taboo if deception occurs. One possible way of doing this is to use an interrogator of the same cultural background as that of the informant. If the folk psychology of the informant holds that deceiving is immoral only when the victim is a member of one's own culture, then this setting should produce leakage clues if the informant is, in fact, lying.

The third conclusion concerns extending and modifying the laboratory research paradigm as a technique for studying deception clues. In order to examine complex interactions between individuals operating in organizational contexts, it would be necessary to supplement classical laboratory experiments with modern quasi-experimental methods, careful surveys, and detailed case histories.

Moving between experimental and field studies also entails the development of statistical procedures that enable an investigator to make the comparisons of interest. The fourth conclusion is a recommendation for the use of videotapes for research and training. Ongoing face-to-face interactions pose a problem for detecting subtle deception clues. Videotaped exchanges between interrogators and informants can be replayed for details easily overlooked in the course of an ongoing conversation.

Independent observers can analyze the interactions, providing judgments that may be free from the biases possessed by participants. A deception will be deliberate when the defendant knows that what he represents as true is untrue. This is predominantly a subjective test, matching the general approach to establishing intentional behaviour. The test of recklessness is also predominantly subjective to show that the defendant is aware that what is represented may or may not be true, excluding the extended meaning of recklessness in R v Caldwell [] AC Deceptions are most commonly made by saying or not saying something significant, as in the advance fee fraud , in which the defendant tells the victim that he is a rich person who needs discreetly to move money abroad, and wants to use the victim's bank account in return for a percentage of the money transferred.

Mere conduct, however, can also imply facts which are untrue. Thus, wearing a particular uniform represents that the person is employed in that occupation, or writing a cheque supported by a cheque card represents that the writer has actual authority from the bank to use the card and that the bank will honour the cheque see Metropolitan Police Commissioner v Charles [8].

If the defendant's words or conduct innocently represent something that later becomes untrue, or the defendant becomes aware the "victim" has made a mistake, they are obligated to correct the misunderstanding. Failure to do so can amount to deception. In Director of Public Prosecutions v Ray [9] the defendant, after eating in a restaurant, decided not to pay for a meal.

The defendant continued to sit quietly, lulling the waiters into believing payment would be made in due course, and thereby obtained the opportunity to leave without paying. Consequently, silence or an omission can be a continuing representation that nothing material has changed and so be a deception. This reasoning has also been applied to the offence of obtaining a service by deception, contrary to section 1 of the Theft Act In R v Rai , [10] the defendant applied for a grant to adapt the house of his infirm mother.

After the work had commenced, he failed to inform the local authority that his mother had died, and thereby obtained completion of the work. His conduct, taken as a whole, amounted to a continuing representation that she was alive. Most deceptions relate to actual or supposed facts, or to an existing state of affairs, but this is distinguished from a false statement of opinion which, no matter how persuasive, is not a deception. Deception offences include situations where the defendant represents that counterfeited goods are genuine items, or misrepresents their identity e.

Statements may appear equivocal and still be a deception. Thus, in R v King [] CLR the defendant admitted that the mileage on a car he was selling might not be correct. He had actually altered the odometer, so this statement was true, but he was properly convicted because in a second statement, he claimed not to know whether the odometer was correct, which was false. Similarly, a man dressed as a police officer who instructs someone to act in a particular way because 'the law requires it,' or a lawyer or accountant who relies on their professional status to mislead a client as to the law for their private benefit, deceives even though the general policy of English law is ignorantia juris non excusat , i.

In Director of Public Prosecutions v Ray , [12] the defendant who sits in a restaurant impliedly represents that they intend to pay for the meal. This is a representation as to present intention and it would be a deception whether the defendant has sufficient money to pay. It is distinguishable from the defendants who hide their money so that they can represent an inability to pay a misrepresentation as to fact. There is an inevitable overlap between the general offence of theft , contrary to section 1 1 , and these offences because they cover both general and specific situations in which the defendant will appropriate property by using some form of deception.

Deception offences are separately defined to avoid any problems that might arise when the "victim" consents to the taking.