Monday, January 15, 2018

"A Field Guide to Deception"

From MIT's Technology Review, Jan. 9:
A crowdsourced psychology experiment reveals that when it comes to dishonesty, there are three kinds of people.

Everybody is familiar with the sense of shock and betrayal at having been lied to. At the same time, people are familiar with the temptation to lie to benefit themselves. Many will have done so.

And that raises an interesting question—given the chance to lie for their own benefit, which people will take the opportunity? What percentage always tell the truth regardless of how much is at stake?  And what percentage always lie to maximize their gain?

Psychologists also want to know whether these behaviors are intuitive. Are we hard-wired to lie or tell the truth? The answer has important implications for our understanding of human nature and our efforts to encourage or discourage certain behaviors in society.

Today we get some insight into these questions thanks to the work of Hélène Barcelo at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and Valerio Capraro at the Middlesex University Business School in London. They have devised a clever way to test our inherent veracity and say their data suggest that humans fall into three categories: the good, the bad, and the angry.
At the simplest level, deciding whether to lie is a binary problem—either we tell the truth or we don’t. Psychologists have devised numerous experiments that explore this scenario.

But in the real world, the decision is usually more complex. It involves a calculation to determine the benefit we can gain from lying but also the punishment it might engender, and whether the potential benefit outweighs the potential loss.

Psychologists have devised ways to test this, too, by offering people lots of different ways to lie so that they must calculate which one benefits them the most.

But no experiment tests all these factors at the same time. Until now.  Barcelo and Capraro have devised an ingenious experiment that tempts people to lie and also gives them the opportunity lie in different ways that change the benefit to them.

The experiment is an online test for workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing website, available to many different people. “By looking at the distribution of choices, we can divide people in types according to the strategy they implement,” say Barcelo and Capraro....MUCH MORE