Deception as a Derived Function of Language

Biological Reviews, 2015

Through dishonest signals or actions, individuals often misinform others to their own benefit. We review recent literature to explore the evolutionary and ecological conditions for deception to be more likely to evolve and be maintained. We identify four conditions: (1) high misinformation potential through perceptual constraints of perceiver; (2) costs and benefits of responding to deception; (3) asymmetric power relationships between individuals and (4) exploitation of common goods. We discuss behavioural and physiological mechanisms that form a deception continuum from secrecy to overt signals. Deceptive tactics usually succeed by being rare and are often evolving under co-evolutionary arms races, sometimes leading to the evolution of polymorphism. The degree of deception can also vary depending on the environmental conditions. Finally, we suggest a conceptual framework for studying deception and highlight important questions for future studies.

Cogito, 1998

Social participation requires certain abilities: communication with other members of society; social understanding which enables planning ahead and dealing with novel circumstances; and a theory of mind which makes it possible to anticipate the mental state of another. In childhood play we learn how to pretend, how to put ourselves in the minds of others, how to imagine what others are thinking and how to attribute false beliefs to them. Without this ability we would be unable to deceive and detect deception in the actions of others, and our ability to interact within our social group would be greatly impaired. In this paper I claim that the capacity for deception is necessary for a theory of mind, and a theory of mind is necessary for complex social interaction.

Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 1982

Previous research has shown both that speech can reliably reveal whether or not deception is occurring and that perceivers are often strongly influenced by speech in their judgments about deceit. Nonetheless, there are relatively few studies of verbal cues to deceit. In the present study, we examined specific verbal and paralinguistic cues that might reveal when deception is occurring or that might be used by perceivers in their attempts to detect deception; also, we examined quantitatively the correspondence between actuEil cues to deception and perceived cues to deception. For the cues that we studied, the degree to which the cues actually were associated with deception corresponded significantly to the degree to which perceivers used those cues as signs of deceit. When senders pretended to like people they really disliked, their descriptions were less positive and more neutral than when they honestly described people they really did like. When feigning disliking, senders uttered more nonfluences than when expressing honest disliking. All of these cues were used by perceivers in their judgments of deceptiveness; in addition, perceivers judged as deceptive descriptions that were spoken slowly and contained many Um's and er's. Expressions of liking that contained many otherreferences, few self-references, and many nonspecific (undifferentiating) descriptors were also perceived to be deceptive. To facilitate the study of actual and perceived cues deception, and their correspondence, a heuristic model was proposed.

Choice Reviews Online, 2005

Neuroreport, 2001

Both the ability to deceive others, and the ability to detect deception, have 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. For the first time, signal-detection theory 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.

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.

A Model of Lying as a Signaling Game: Conceptual Analysis, Implications, and Applications possibilities for explaining the development of lying as an evolutionary strategy. Finally, in Part III, I suggest how my model of lying could provide new directions for employing the Cognitive Load Approach developed in cognitive science as a method of deception detection. Part I: A Conceptual Analysis and Formalization of Lying How much of human life depends on deception? Because of the very nature of the subject

The literature on language evolution treats the fact that language allows for lying as a major obstacle to the emergence and development of language, and thus looks for theoretical means to constrain the lie. In this paper, I claim that this general formulation of the issue at hand misses out on the fact that lying made an enormous contribution to the evolution of language. Without the lie, language would not be as complex as it is, linguistic communication would be much simpler, the cognitive requirement of language would not be so heavy, and its role in society would be radically different. The argument is based on Dor's (2015) theory of language as a social communication technology, collectively-designed for the instruction of imagination. The theory rethinks the essence of lying, and suggests that the emergence of language did more to enhance the human capacity for deception than it did to enhance the human capacity for honest communication. Lying, then, could not be constrained, but language did not collapse. The conception of lying as a threat to language, as it is formulated in the literature, is based on a series of unrealistic assumptions. Most importantly, the cognitive, emotional and social capacities required for lying, lie-detection and moral enforcement are never equally spread within communities: they are highly variable. Lying and language came to be entangled in a never-ending co-evolutionary spiral, which changed the map of communicative relationships within communities, and participated in shaping our languages, societies, cognitions and emotions. We evolved for lying, and because of lying, just as much as we evolved for and because of honest communication.