Lying and Deception in Games

Lying and Deception in Games

This article proposes definitions of lying and deception in strategic settings. A critical distinction is that deception requires a model of how the audience responds to messages while lying does not. Lies need not be deceptive. Deception does not require lying. The paper identifies situations in which lying is consistent with equilibrium and when the ability to lie is welfare enhancing. Decept...

Lying and Deception Lying and Self-deception

Questions about truthfulness occur in many contexts—when parents ask their children if they are using recreational drugs, when an employer ask applicants about the reasons they left their last job, when international leaders consider each others’ threats or promises, when voters evaluate candidates’ promises, when physicians consider a patient’s complaint, when at the start of a romantic encoun...

Deception and lying.

Lying words: predicting deception from linguistic styles.

Telling lies often requires creating a story about an experience or attitude that does not exist. As a result, false stories may be qualitatively different from true stories. The current project investigated the features of linguistic style that distinguish between true and false stories. In an analysis of five independent samples, a computer-based text analysis program correctly classified lia...

A cognitive analysis of deception without lying

When the interests of interlocutors are not aligned, either party may wish to avoid truthful disclosure. A sender wishing to conceal the truth from a receiver may lie by providing false information, mislead by actively encouraging the receiver to reach a false conclusion, or simply be uninformative by providing little or no relevant information. Lying entails moral and other hazards, such as de...