{"pk":28573,"title":"Designing good deception: Recursive theory of mind in lying and lie detection","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The human ability to deceive others and detect deception haslong been tied to theory of mind. We make a stronger argu-ment: in order to be adept liars – to balance gain (i.e. maxi-mizing their own reward) and plausibility (i.e. maintaining arealistic lie) – humans calibrate their lies under the assumptionthat their partner is a rational, utility-maximizing agent. Wedevelop an adversarial recursive Bayesian model that aims toformalize the behaviors of liars and lie detectors. We comparethis model to (1) a model that does not perform theory of mindcomputations and (2) a model that has perfect knowledge ofthe opponent’s behavior. To test these models, we introduce anovel dyadic, stochastic game, allowing for quantitative mea-sures of lies and lie detection. In a second experiment, we varythe ground truth probability. We find that our rational modelsqualitatively predict human lying and lie detecting behaviorbetter than the non-rational model. Our findings suggest thathumans control for the extremeness of their lies in a mannerreflective of rational social inference. These findings provide anew paradigm and formal framework for nuanced quantitativeanalysis of the role of rationality and theory of mind in lyingand lie detecting behavior.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"deception; Theory of Mind; Bayesian reasoning;non-cooperative games; computational modeling"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4c81849n","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Lauren","middle_name":"A.","last_name":"Oey","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Adena","middle_name":"","last_name":"Schachner","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Edward","middle_name":"","last_name":"Vul","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28573/galley/18444/download/"}]}