The evolutionary ecology of deception

Current Zoology

Evolutionary consequences of deception - special issue

Choice Reviews Online, 2005

Proceedings of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2019

In an evolutionary context, trusted signals or cues provide individuals with the opportunity to manipulate them to their advantage by deceiving others. The deceived can then respond to the deception by either ignoring the signals or cues or evolving means of deception-detection. If the latter happens, it can result in an arms race between deception and detection. Here, we formally analyse these possibilities in the context of cue-mimicry in prey-predator interactions. We demonstrate that two extrinsic parameters control whether and for how long an arms race continues: the benefits of deception, and the cost of ignoring signals and cues and having an indiscriminate response. As long as the cost of new forms of deception is less than its benefits and the cost of new forms of detection is less than the cost of an indiscriminate response, an arms race results in the perpetual evolution of better forms of detection and deception. When novel forms of deception or detection become too costly to evolve, the population settles on a polymorphic equilibrium involving multiple strategies of deception and honesty, and multiple strategies of detection and trust.

Deception has recently received a significant amount of attention. One of main reasons is that it lies at the intersection of various areas of research, such as the evolution of cooperation, animal communication, ethics or epistemology. This essay focuses on the biological approach to deception and argues that standard definitions put forward by most biologists and philosophers are inadequate. We provide a functional account of deception which solves the problems of extant accounts in virtue of two characteristics: deceptive states have the function of causing a misinformative states and they do not necessarily provide direct benefits to the deceivers and losses to the targets.

Animal Behaviour, 2013

ABSTRACT The study of reliability, or ‘honesty’, in communication between individuals with conflicting interests has been a major focus of game theoretical modelling in evolutionary biology. It has been proposed that mixed populations of honest and deceptive signallers can be evolutionarily stable in a model of conventional, or ‘minimal cost’, signals of competitive ability, and evolutionary simulations have been presented to support this hypothesis. However, we find that these results are questionable on both theoretical and methodological grounds. Here, we examine the theoretical issues raised by this model and examine the proposed ‘cheating’ strategy through the use of a genetic algorithm. Our evolutionary simulations do not support the hypothesis that deception can be evolutionarily stable in this game. Intuition and common sense have it that animals communicate using ambiguous threat displays that have an underlying probabilistic mixed strategy type of mechanism, but there remains no working game theoretical model of such a communication system.

The Knowledge Engineering Review, 2016

Biologists have mostly studied under what circumstances honest signaling is stable.Stability, however, is not sufficient to explain theemergenceof honest signaling. We study the evolution of honest signaling between selfish, adaptive individuals and observe that honest signaling can emerge through learning. More importantly, honest signaling may emerge in cases where it is not evolutionary stable. In such cases, honesty and dishonesty co-exist. Furthermore, honest signaling does not necessarily emerge in cases where it is evolutionary stable. We show that the latter is due to the existence of other, more important equilibria and that the importance of equilibria is related to Pareto-optimality.

2014

Biologists have mostly studied under what circumstances honest signaling is stable. Stability, however, is not sufficient to explain the emergence of honest signaling. We study the evolution of honest signaling between selfish, adaptive individuals and observe that honest signaling can emerge through learning. More importantly, honest signaling may emerge in cases where it is not evolutionarystable. In such cases, honesty and dishonesty co-exist. Furthermore, honest signaling does not necessarily emerge in cases where it is evolutionary stable. We show that the latter is due to the existence of other, more important equilibria and that the importance of equilibria is related to Pareto-optimality. 1

Deceptions are fascinating because they remind us about the mismatch or the in between of what one perceives and what the actual reality is. This continuation is the process by which the brain makes things seems whole based on sparse information. Deception had been previously categorized as a distinctly human activity based upon the human abilities like self-awareness, language use and intentionality. Animals were thought to be incapable of deception because they lacked these prerequisites. In animals, deception is the transmission of misinformation by one animal to another, of the same or different species, in a way that propagates beliefs that are not true, this may or may not be a conscious act depending on different levels of cognitive ability. It is important to be rigorous in separating the cognitive use of deception from a purely functional one. The potential for animals to " deceive " one another via " dishonest " signals has been a major question in behavior for many years. Formal analyses support this generalization but also predict modest amounts of unreliability, particularly in situations where signalers and receivers have conflicting objectives. As expected, limited amounts of signal unreliability are observed in various species. The flexibility of signal traits across environments poses a different problem for reliable communication, which biologists are only now beginning to recognize. Deception could be characterized in two, one which uses cognitive ability while other is purely functional and here we would be more focused on the former than the latter as the latter hardly encourages us to speculate about the mental state of the animal while going through a functional deception. The " Mullerian " mimicry of the viceroy butterfly is one of the classic examples of the functional deception while tactical thinking by the primates is an example of the type of deception, which uses cognitive ability and would be discussed below. It has also been argued that the type of deception is mostly related to the size of the brain. There are numerous types of deception. One of it relies on the systematic collection and analysis of unique social interactions while the other depends on interspecific communication, focusing upon signals that are designed to affect the behavior of potential predators or vice versa. While the third involves, intraspecific communication by the selective production of signals which are normally evoked by the approach of the predator. Intraspecific deception could again be subdivided are those animals which withhold signals under conditions in which they are usually produced or signaling in absence of putative referent. Hence the former can be termed as " passive " deception and the latter can be termed as " active " deception.

Lying is universal-we all do it; we all must do it. -Mark Twain.

Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2013

This Focused Review expands upon our original paper (You can't kid a kidder": Interaction between production and detection of deception in an interactive deception task. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6:87). In that paper we introduced a new socially interactive, laboratory-based task, the Deceptive Interaction Task (DeceIT), and used it to measure individuals' ability to lie, their ability to detect the lies of others, and potential individual difference measures contributing to these abilities. We showed that the two skills were correlated; better liars made better lie detectors (a "deception general" ability) and this ability seemed to be independent of cognitive (IQ) and emotional (EQ) intelligence. Here, following the Focused Review format, we outline the method and results of the original paper and comment more on the value of lab-based experimental studies of deception, which have attracted criticism in recent years. While acknowledging that experimental paradigms may fail to recreate the full complexity and potential seriousness of real-world deceptive behavior, we suggest that lab-based deception paradigms can offer valuable insight into ecologically-valid deceptive behavior. The use of the DeceIT procedure enabled deception to be studied in an interactive setting, with motivated participants, and importantly allowed the study of both the liar and the lie detector within the same deceptive interaction. It is our thesis that by addressing deception more holisticallyby bringing the liar into the "spotlight" which is typically trained exclusively on the lie detector-we may further enhance our understanding of deception.