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The
Psychology
of Human
Deception BY ROBERT W. MITCHELL
A proposition constructs a world with the help of a logical scaffolding, so that one can actually see from the proposition how everything stands logically </it is true. One can draw inferences from a false proposition (Wittgenstein, [1921] 1971, p. 41).
/ \ L T H O U G H etiquette expert Emily (Mrs. Price) Post claimed that etiquette requires "honesty and trustworthiness in every obligation" (Post, 1945, p. 2), she offered this advice for the unhappy visitor:
If you go to stay in a small house in the country, and they give you a bed full of lumps, in a room of mosquitoes and flies, on a floor over that of a crying baby, under the eaves with a temperature of over a hundred, you can the next morning walk to the village, and send yourself a telegram and leave! But you feel starved, exhausted, wilted, and are mosquito bitten until you resemble a well-developed case of chickenpox or measles, by not so much as a facial muscle must you let the family know that your comfort lacked anything that your happiest imagination could picture—nor must you confide in any one afterwards (having broken bread in the house) how desperately wretched you were (pp. 428-29).
Post's claim of honesty in etiquette is belied by the fact that many of her prescriptions sacrifice honesty in personal relations for the appearance of pleasant discourse. Her prescriptions utilize many of the ploys of the skilled deceiver
SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Fall 1996)
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and rely on normative presuppositions and inferencing processes essential to honest communication and the attain- ment of knowledge. In this essay, I elaborate the nature of deception to show how deception is a natural outgrowth of communication and knowledge (just as illusion is a natural outgrowth of perception).
Communication, Presuppositions, and Conventions
Deception frequently parasitizes "communicative action oriented toward reaching understanding" (Habermas, [1976] 1979, p. 209). In such communicative action, for one person to communicate with another, the communicator (addressor) and "understander" (addressee) must share particular expectations or presuppositions about the communicative exchange. These expectations or presuppositions are, specifically, that the addressor is telling the truth about the external world, that the addressor's utterances are justifiable in relation to interperson- ally accepted roles and norms, and that the addressor is sincerely making his or her communicative intentions evident to the addressee.' These presuppositions are not untestable or blind assumptions, but are implicit "claims" to the validity of the offered communication. If these claims are apparently violated, a (mature) addressee can make them the theme of the communicative exchange—that is, can verify his or her understanding—by questioning the addressor about their validity in this exchange. Thus, for example, if an addressee believes that the addressor is insincere, the addressee can ask the addressor if she or he truly believes what she or he says, or can ask for evidence that the proposition is in fact true. The presuppositions described by Habermas derive from the fact that human communication is based on conventions. Con- ventions are regularities which are maintained within a group, in part because they are in general mutually maintained and recognized as regularities by group-members (Lewis, 1969). As
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swindled out of $50,000 by two con men named Nelson and McPherson who claimed they could find out which horse had won a race before the betting was closed, which would allow Felix to place "bets" on a horse which had already won; when Felix questioned their sincerity, they proposed that Felix check out the veracity of their claims and offered (false) "proofs" of their veracity (Train, [1908] 1922, pp. 103-21), bringing the validity claims of truth and sincerity to the foreground and thereby appearing to verify their honesty. Deceivers can also attempt to imply that the interpersonal relation between themselves and their victims is justifiable, as when the con man Nelson justified his friendliness toward Felix by claiming to have met him at a gambling house. In another instance, a con man told police that documents which showed his (nonexist- ent) academic honors were being renovated, and then informed them, as an aside, "I should mention that although I received my award from the University of Tokyo in 1977, the date on the document is 1952. This is because in Tokyo the year 1952 corresponds to our 1977" (Harris, 1987, p. 124). This bizarre fabrication has the ring of sincerity: by directing attention to an odd facet of false "evidence" and explaining it away, the con man directs the victim's attention away from the evidence per se and appears all the more sincere for admitting how suspicious looking the odd facet is.
Another con man, John Hamrak, utilized both hiding and calling attention to all three validity claims to deceive. In trying to steal a valuable clock in a city hall in Hungary, Hamrak arrived with an accomplice acting as a technician and told the man responsible for the clock that they had come to take the clock for repairs. Because the clock was valuable, the man did not want to release it.
Instead of further substantiating his role, Hamrak responded by calling the alderman's attention to the extraordinary value of the clock, declaring that it was for this reason that he had come for it in person.... When Hamrak points out that the clock is extremely valuable, he tells the truth and is sincere.... If the
PSYCHOLOGY OF DECEPTION 823
victim acknowledges the con man's remark as truth and accordingly reflects that a man who speaks the truth is an honest man and can be trusted, the truth of the statement is referred back to the intention and validates it (Hankiss, 1980, pp. 108-9).
Hamrak here engages in a "blurring" of the "distinction between truth and sincerity" (Hankiss, 1980, p. 109). His openhanded answer to one validity claim —that of speaking the truth in relation to the value of the clock—implicitly suggests both: (1) that all his other statements are satisfying this validity claim to truth, and (2) that he is also satisfying the validity claim of sincerity. The validity claim to the normality and appropriateness of their respective interpersonal roles is satisfied implicitly by the appearance of the technician and by Hamrak's request for the clock. The presuppositions described by Habermas appear to depend upon typically tacit expectations about regularities in language use. Deception is an explanation which is "outside normality" (Hankiss, 1980, p. 108) precisely because it violates validity claims and expectations derived from what is likely to happen or be the case. In order for deception to occur, then, the victim must have expectations, the deceiver must have expectations about the victim's expectations, and the deceiver must act with those expectations in mind. As a result, deception paradoxically requires "a shared system of interpre- tation and meaning" (Mawby and Mitchell, 1986, p. 321) or a "mutual alignment of perspectives" between deceiver and victim (Quiatt, 1988, p. 261).'' This mutual alignment in deception derives from normal human commtinication, in which speaker and audience share myriad "common back- ground belief[s]" (including those of Habermas) called "pragmatic presuppositions" (Stalnaker, [1974] 1977, p. 137). In general, "A proposition P is a pragmatic presupposition ofa speaker in a given context just in case the speaker assumes or believes that P, assumes or believes that his addressee assumes or believes that P, and assumes or believes that his addressee recognizes that he is making these assumptions, or has these
PSYCHOLOGY OF DECEPTION 825
enact T. While I lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, one secretary took perverse pleasure in handing me things only to pull them back sharply when I moved to take hold of them; her father had played this game with her as a child, but it is a common mammalian game (Mitchell and Thompson, 1990) and one of the earliest deceptions by children (Chevalier- Skolnikoff, 1986, p. 210). In Clifton, New Jersey, for a time during the summer of 1989, several neighbors displayed quite real-looking but also quite fake fruit in a bowl, enjoying people's mistaking the fruit for real; one woman unintention- ally delighted her friend by attempting to bite into the fruit after being invited to eat some. In a pizza parlor in Albany, New York, after I handed my payment for lunch over the clear countertop which sloped smoothly down in front of the pizza-cutting table below it, the cashier handed me my change below the countertop, with the result that I smashed my hand into the clear partition to obtain the change; the man laughed when he handed me change over the countertop. He deceived (with as much apparent pleasure) the next patrons as well. Once the functional or operative procedures of any system are known, the deceiver can derive reasonably accurate expectations about the system. Because of the usual co- occurrence of S and T, S becomes a sign for T. However, because knowledge of a regularity between S and T does not indicate that S and T must co-occur, but merely that they usually co-occur, S can imply T when T is not the case. Thus occurs the possibility of deception: the fruit in the kitchen bowl can be fake; clear glass may be present between a cashier's hand and one's own; the coughing poker player might repeatedly cough before bluffing in order to be able to "bluff a bluff" by coughing when not about to bluffs
A regularity may also be expected which is not based on usualness, much as a stereotype is expected but not "statisti- cally normal," and this expectation of regularity is as easily used for deception as is statistical normality (Anderson, 1986, pp. 338-39). Thus, people sometimes expect regularities when
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there are none. Roy Cohn appealed to the inconsistency between his "toughness" and the presumed "softness" of homosexuals as evidence against his actual homosexuality (demons, 1988, p. 69), but his stereotype is not a depiction of the statistically normal homosexual (Weinberg and Williams, 1974, p. 222). And people are often quite willing to extrapolate from a small sample to every instance and, hence, to have inaccurate beliefs about usualness (Nisbett and Ross, 1981). Thus, an expected norm can be created without any appeal to actual normality. For example, Hollywood movies provided a style for gangsters which their real-life counterparts came to imitate: "nobody was quite sure how gangsters really talked, or even what they looked like. The gangsters themselves... didn't... know how they were supposed to behave. So Hollywood taught them" (Friedrich, 1979, p. 83). Any time a regularity is known or expected, the sign of the regularity can be used to deceive. This capacity for misrepre- sentation is a necessary constituent of signs (Eco, 1976, pp. 6—7) precisely because of their reliance upon regularity. Because our sociality is both dependent upon and perfused with signs, we are continually prey to deception.
Schemas
People's expectations of regularity (and thus normality) exist as schemas, which are mental representations which organize and categorize regularities. Schemas provide "a framework within which to locate new items of knowledge" (Jones, Harrd, and Lamb, 1983, p. 544). Presuppositions described by Habermas are schemas, as are concepts, event knowledge, sensori-motor knowledge, and just about any understanding (explicit or implicit) of what generally (regularly) goes with what. Schemas can coordinate many regularities, such that in a regularity between S and T, S may represent many "signs" or indicators and T may represent many correlated outcomes.
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diaper change, gesturing toward her diaper and saying "Cack" to indicate a dirty diaper; her mother, however, knew that the child's diaper was clean (Dunn, 1988, p. 20). Contextual, event-relevant knowledge is incorporated into scripts, which are schemas about the sequence of an event which are (commonly) empirically derived. Scripts are "specific knowledge [we use] to interpret and participate in events we have been through many times" (Schank and Abelson, 1977, p. 37), such as eating in a restaurant or going to a movie. "Since certain sequences of events frequently occur in a specific order we must postulate that people have developed special mechanisms to deal with them. That is, there are certain groupings of causal chains that exist in the form of large conceptual units" (Schank and Abelson, 1977, pp. 37-8). Any instance of these "large conceptual units" is a script—"a standard event sequence" (Schank and Abelson, 1977, p. 38). People can recognize scripts and apply them to "fill... in the causal chain between two seemingly unrelated events by referring to the script" (Schank and Abelson, 1977, p. 38). Because people easily extrapolate from single instances to generalized claims, scripts probably do not require actual experience to develop but can also derive from vicarious experiences, such as watching an event on television or hearing about it.^ Once a deception is started during enactment of a script, the following of the script allows the deceiver to benefit from the deception. Upon receipt of the telegram she sent herself, Emily Post's unhappy guest can leave without explanation because she has been called away by "someone else." Scripts are not the only complex schemas utilized in deception. Other common schemas exist for scenes and stories (Mandler, 1984). Particular deceptions may require, to produce a simulation, more specific skills and their consequent schemas. In the nineteenth century, the female hunter Lucy Lobdell's efforts to make money for her poor family and then to secure a happy existence with her female lover required her
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to dress and act the part of a man and later a husband.^ She made up her mind "to dress in men's attire to seek labor, as I was used to men's work.... I might work harder at house-work, and get only a dollar per week, [but] I was capable of doing men's work, and getting men's wages" (Lobdell, [1855] 1976, p. 219). One forger "slipped in and out of other people's handwriting as he did his various pseudonyms and biographies, with complete ease" (Harris, 1987, p. 116). But along with these schemas and skills, the deceiver must be able to take the perspective of the victim if the deception is to be successful. For example, a successful art forger must have, in addition to the artistic skills (for example, visual-motor dexterity) necessary to create works similar to the artist's, schemas for: (1) recognition of visual similarities among (some of) the artist's works as well as between these works and the forger's work;' (2) a tacit appreciation of a victim's expectations of the "look" of the artist's works (which may depend upon sharing the victim's culture); and, in some cases, (3) an understanding of artistic implements (for example, types of materials used) and expectations of people in the historical period in which the artist worked. For example, the forgery Fortune Teller, purported to be by seventeenth-century French painter George de la Tour, was discovered to be a fake because the painting depicts costumes which were not found in other seventeenth-century paintings, and displays a lack of the "care for... minutiae" which in an essential characteristic of la Tour's work (Wright and de Marly, 1980, p. 23). In this case, failure to successfully employ the last two schemas led to the recognition of forgery because the painting went against (some) people's expectations concerning la Tour's works. In deceptions during wartime (and assuredly elsewhere), "the deception plan must emerge logically out of the past, must correspond logically with current activities, and proceed logically toward the future. It is therefore vital that the "story" or deception scenario be so designed that when it diverges from reality, as it most assuredly must, the divergence can be
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(Schank and Abelson, 1977, p. 70). Thus, using a plan, a person can make predictions, via inference, not only about what led to what or what leads to what, but also about an agent's intentions. "By finding a plan, an understander can make guesses about the intentions of an action in an unfolding story and use these guesses to make sense of the story" (Schank and Abelson, 1977, p. 70). In some cases, enactment of deception requires following a script, as when con artists follow rather closely a credible storyline (Blum, 1972). But even here, deceivers must be attentive to novelty in the form of deviation of victims from the scripted responses. Indeed, if the same people interact again after a deception has been uncovered by the victim, use of the same scripted deception will become less likely to be effective because the victim knows the deception. For example, in teaching someone deceptive plays in bridge, an expert offers "a word of caution": "To attempt to memorize these deceptive plays, with the aim of putting them into a habitual pattern oF behavior, will only serve to make a stereotyped player of you; and your opponents will get to know your style and profit thereby" (Karpin, 1960, p. 220). Similar injunctions to avoid being obvious by repeating the same ploys are relevant in sports as well (Barnett with Borgi, 1971, pp. 29, 37; Dawson with Billings, 1972, p. 66). The potential deceiver is best directed to learn to understand plans: "in studying the deceptive tactics... presented, one's objective should be to analyze and understand the motivation that gave birth to them, rather than to memorize them in order to earmark them for immediate and future application.... [Y]ou will learn how to utilize your imagination so that it can rise to the fore via its own momentum when the circumstances for its practical employment arise" (Karpin, 1960, pp. 220, 21). Plans, then, are a means by which people can figure out what other people are doing (or what they themselves should do) when not following scripts. Using both plans and scripts, people recognize and make sense of regularities. With scripts, once people recognize the
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particular sequence of events underway, they can make predictions from experience. With plans, people make hypotheses about the goals of the agent, and then make predictions by inferring what is necessary to achieve these goals. The person imaginatively places the agent in a context within which the agent's activities make sense. Just as when we use context to infer the meaning of sign used conventionally, we use context imaginatively to infer for ourselves how an experience unusual for us is experienced by another (Walton, 1990, p. 34). Knowledge of another's psychological experience is often second nature to many who frequently deceive others,^ as this check-forger describes:
Every situation is different, and if you don't lean to play them by ear, you're in big trouble. Maybe this is where experience really counts; you learn to read these people. Eor instance, after a while, when someone makes a confirming phone call you can almost overhear the conversation just by the set of his shoulders or the way he fingers the [forged] check. If he's told he's holding a stiff, you can almost see it burning his fingers (Klein and Montague, 1977, pp. 16-17, italics deleted).
Surprisingly, such ability to take the part of the other demonstrated in acumen need not result in any sympathetic or compassionate response to another's turmoil at being deceived. The deceiver can invent reasons why the other deserves to be deceived even while the deceiver recognizes that the victim would be psychologically better off without the deception.'^ So the same imaginative propensity which allows someone to take the perspective of the other also allows the person to imagine the other from a perspective which discounts the other's perspective. Deceptions do not require a deceiver to know every regularity, or even many of them, anticipated by the victim, because deceptions are circumscribed. If I am to deceive you in basketball, I do not need to know what you expect in normal social interaction, and vice versa. Although elaborated skills
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which can be used to defeat the deception. Particularly when deceptions are more protracted, the deception must be tailored to the victim, and, thus, very specific knowledge of an individual is needed. How is this knowledge gained? As one check-forger noted, "The best way to learn a bank's check-clearing schedules or find out who approves checks there is to open an account and do some legitimate transactions" (Klein and Montague, 1977, pp. 21-2, italics deleted). To get some sense of how someone operates, one must similarly engage in "legitimate transactions." Thus, knowledge of a victim is best gained by observation of and involvement with the victim. Presumably, extensive interaction with another should allow a deceiver to take the other's perspective. Unless the deceiver can take the perspective of the other, more protracted deceptions are likely to fall apart. The unseemly consequence of the greater knowledge gained through intense involvement with another is that one should expect to be most easily deceived by those who know one best, because they have access to the type of knowledge which one is most likely to be taken in by (Mitchell, 1988; Quiatt, 1988; Bond, 1989; McCornack and Parks, 1990; Buller, Strzyzewski, and Comstock, 1991). Even when the victim seems to be taking the bait, the deceiver must continue to look at things from the victim's perspective if the deception is used frequently or is at all protracted: "the success of any disinformation operation depends on being able to monitor how far your enemy accepts the disinformation you are feeding him' (Wright with Greenglass, 1987, p. 79). The victim is going to try to verify, to some degree, what the deceiver says and does according to some schema-based model (accurate or inaccurate) the victim has of the situation created by the deceiver. As the epigraph from Wittgenstein notes, one can make inferences from false propositions. One small aspect of the total configuration presented by the deceiver could make the victim suspicious if that aspect diverges from her schema that the configuration is
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intended to access and the consequent predictions." For example, the fact that one art forger's partner stayed in expensive hotels whereas he could afford only cheaper ones told him that he was not receiving the 60 percent of their joint proceeds his partner claimed (Irving, [1969] 1971, pp. 108-09). Just as the deceiver can imagine plans within which to entangle a victim, the victim can imagine what the deceiver might be imagining. Such acumen led historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to recognize that a set of diaries and other artifacts purportedly authored by Hider were fakes: he asked himself, "How would a forger of Hitler's diaries proceed?" developed a model, and discovered that the diaries "had a discomforting correspondence with this model" (Trevor- Roper, quoted in Harris, 1987, pp. 307-8). To circumvent the victim's suspicions, the deceiver can provide the other with information which fits the victim's expectations. For example, by creating story after story about Rock Hudson's romantic involvements with women to camou- flage his romantic involvements with men, the press allowed people to believe the expected: that Hudson was heterosexual (Adler with Reese, 1985). The deceiver's objective is to access the victim's schemas as unobtrusively as possible, so that the victim has no awareness that he or she is being entangled. Because the victim may make false infer-ences and rearrange his memories and beliefs to conform to his available schemas, he is often an unknowing participant in his own deception. The victim is most vulnerable, however, when he or she ardently seeks and expects to find what the deceiver supplies. Here, a victim is likely to be highly credulous and undemand- ing of verification, presumably because his belief that something is the case overcomes his need for verification that it is the case. Such credulity occurred with the paleontological discovery of a skull with simian jaw and human skull, assumed to evidence an evolutionary "missing link" between apes and humans called "Piltdown man" but actually a forgery which satisfied scientific expectations (Weiner, [1955]
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to fit the victims' schemas in order to make predictions. But the deceiver is not totally dependent upon the existing schemas of the victim. The deceiver has another option: he or she can make the victim take a perspective supplied by the deceiver. That is, the deceiver can tell a story.
Story-Telling and Self-Deception
When adolescent Geoffrey Wolff was told by his father, a con artist, that they suddenly had money because he had inherited his father's estate, Geoffrey believed him. Much later he wrote, "To believe the fable of the inheritance required great will, an appetite for credulity I can now credit only by assuming that I preferred this fabulous notion to the transparent reality that my father was a drifter, living off a woman who didn't seem inclined to give anything away free" (Wolff, 1979, p. 155). Although a story may offer a victim information which fits in with his hopes or beliefs, the particular beliefs the story provides may not all be ones the victim had prior to being influenced by the story. Thus, a story depends upon accessing particular expectations such as scripts, but also upon accessing plans, the means the victim has for interpreting nonscripted phenomena. By providing a story, the deceiver provides the victim with a perspective different from the victim's own, but one which the victim can make his or her own. For example, Hollywood filmmakers created stories about people such as gangsters which purported to be true and became so as a result, and Hollywood actors created stories about their lives which were believable yet untrue but perfectly acceptable to fans (Friedrich, 1979, p. 171). Past president Ronald Reagan blatantly confused movies with reality,'2 and in more subtle ways perhaps all Americans do, since the Hollywood "dream factory of the 194O's... created much of what Americans today regard as real" (Friedrich, 1979, p. xiii).'
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"Before any tale can greatly please the hearer thereof, it must have some degree of verisimilitude; it must conquer part of our faith" (Nevins, [1938] 1969, pp. 194-5). Stories are particularly useful ways to achieve verisimilitude in deception because
a well-constructed story may sway judgments even when evidence is in short supply.... [When] audiences for stories... have not been directly exposed to the events or actions in them, they have little recourse but to base their judgments about the credibility of stories on assessments about story structure.... To the extent that these assessments yield ambiguities, the story will be... regarded as implausible (Bennett and Feldman, 1981, p. 68).
Thus, one of the means normally employed by people to determine the veracity of a deceptive story is to discern its plausibility. The objective for the deceiver is to create a story which is unambiguous because "the more ambiguous the story is.. ., the less plausible it is" (Bennett and Feldman, 1981, p. 88). Deceptions in wartime often employ a "deception 'story,' which frequently draws inspiration from enemy perceptions of reality.... [T]he deception officer must draw on all his resourcefulness and knowledge of the enemy's psychology to select those stimuli that will cause the enemy to react in the desired preselected manner" (Sexton, 1986, p. 352). When evidence is nonexistent, suspect (Haywood, 1987, p. 28), or difficult to gather, people turn to structural properties of the story to determine its truth value—a bit of our natural history quite useful to deceivers. "Since it would be senseless and practically impossible to investigate the veracity of isolated details in a con artist's story, those details will assume a meaning from the context. Identifying the logical consistency of a series of details (the con man's story) with the truth and genuineness of the whole story is one of the main sources of the con artist's success" (Hankiss, 1980, p. 109). It was exactly this sort of logic—taking the logical consistency of the whole for
