Deception as a Social Strategy

Deception can be advantageous to a deceiver when the truth conflicts with his or her goals be they personal or social, selfless or selfish. Thus it is that people regularly use deception to avoid conflict with others, to avoid punishment or embarrassment, to fit into a group, to harm, protect or help others, and for material or non-material benefit to themselves. While there are many ways in which people can deceive, for example, by choosing to fabricate rather than to tell a half-truth, there are always cost-benefit trade-offs, regardless of the strategy a person chooses. Understanding why people deceive in everyday life situations, how they do it, why they choose one strategy over another, and why sometimes they might choose not to deceive at all, even in the absence of any serious anticipated cost, will enable us to build richer models of socially intelligent behavior--models that could be employed in computational systems designed to facilitate enterprises such as elder care, tutoring, and professional training. In this workshop, we aim to address three basic questions: (1) what factors lead people to deceive? (2) what makes them decide to deceive one way rather than another? and (3) how can we model these factors computationally? What we aim to achieve We aim to highlight research on how people use deception as a social strategy, and provide an overview of how issues related to the questions raised above have been addressed by various disciplines. Even though there has been research in several fields including communication studies, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, economics, and neuroscience, on the question of why and how people deceive one another, there is no comprehensive integration of the different views and observations found in the literature. The confirmed speakers represent many of these disciplines, and this workshop would be a good opportunity to explore together similar research questions from different disciplinary perspectives. Why is it important Most of the research on deception has focused on deception detection, rather than generation. We believe there is a need to move in the direction of rectifying this imbalance, for the reasons mentioned in the abstract above. This workshop will provide an opportunity for people interested in deception to focus more on the generation aspect, and will help in making a stronger case of more research in this area. Relevance to CogSci 2013 The goals of this workshop, which focuses on an emerging and a cross-disciplinary research topic, are directly linked to the theme of CogSci 2013, which is "Cooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics." We treat deception as a social strategy, which often is used to enhance social interactions and cooperation within groups.