Simon Henderson, Author at Deception by Design

Moths and Fake News

By Simon Henderson on January 12, 2020

On an episode of ‘The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien’ that aired in 2009, the comedian Norm McDonald told a now oft-repeated joke, a much-condensed version of which goes as follows:

So, a moth walks into a podiatrists office. The podiatrist says: “Hi, what’s the problem?”

The moth responds dejectedly: “If only there were one problem… My wife doesn’t love me. In fact, I can’t remember a time when she did love me. My daughter has married a man whom I despise, and who despises me. And my son is a miserable failure. When I look at him, all I see is a reflection of my own failures. I don’t know how to go on, doc.”

The podiatrist replies: “Those seen like serious problems, but I’m only a podiatrist. Tell me, why did you come to me today?”

And the moth replies: “Because your light was on.”

Humans similarly gravitate both physically and metaphorically towards the light. Bright, shiny things, including bright, shiny information, seduce our sensory systems. We get drawn, we look, and (as per the proverbial drunkard hunting for his lost keys beneath the streetlight) we search where the light is brightest.

To become better at counter-deception, we need to look behind the light. Who owns the light? Who controls where the light shines? What does the light illuminate? And what is deliberately left in darkness? We need to spend more time exploring the shadows, directing our personal spotlight towards a broader set of sources and information. By doing so, we move from passive consumers of what we are given, to active searchers for, and creators of meaning.

There are many processes involved in counter-deception, but looking in the right places is one of the earliest. Looking in the right way is also critical. In future posts, I shall explore these issues and the topic of fake news in more detail.

Parasitic Deception

By Simon Henderson on January 7, 2020

I recently visited a fascinating exhibition on ‘Parasites: Battle for Survival’, currently on at the National Museum of Scotland.

The exhibition explores the parasites that cause Malaria (Plasmodium Falciparum), Schistosomiasis (Schistosoma), Leishmaniasis (Leishmania), Sleeping Sickness (Trypanosoma Brucei) and Guinea Worm Disease (Dracunculus Medinensis). The exhibition examines current lab and field research that is seeking to learn more about these diseases, the transmission vectors used by the parasites that cause them, education and behaviour change programmes that aim to reduce the spread of the diseases, drug treatments, and associated technologies. It draws from research conducted by the Universities of Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

It was interesting to see how Plasmodium is evolving to counter anti-malarial drugs. Research has shown that it can ‘count’ how many of its parasites are killed by each dose of a medicine and then use this information to decide the extent to which it should continue multiplying inside the host as opposed to transmitting to mosquitos. These strategies enable Plasmodium to replicate and spread better, making it harder to kill. Plasmodium can also ‘tell the time’, scheduling multiplication in the blood to coincide with its host’s mealtimes. This temporal awareness helps the parasite to coordinate its transmission with the night biting of mosquitos.

Deception features in several places throughout the exhibition. For example, the exhibition addresses how various parasites can manipulate their vectors, altering their behaviour to increase the chances of successfully invading a host. Once inside a body, the parasite can hide inside a cell to avoid detection by the immune system, enslaving it to support its growth. By deleting just one gene, researchers have found that Plasmodium can be tricked into thinking it is already safely inside a liver cell, leaving it in reality outside of the cell and thus vulnerable to attack by the immune system.

One of the comics produced to help educate communities about Malaria illustrates how, to multiply, Plasmodium adds markers to the surface of an enslaved red blood cell, allowing it to collect nutrients and respond to its surroundings. These markers signal that the cell is infected, and eventually, they are detected by the ever-adapting immune system. To counter this, Plasmodium updates and modifies its markers so that the immune system is left tracking-down parasites with old markers. In contrast, the parasites with the new markers remain unrecognised and therefore untouched by the immune system. So long as the ‘disguises’ keep changing, the immune system is always left one step behind.

Understanding how parasites employ deception to replicate and spread, and also using deception as a strategy to fight these processes are both excellent pro-social applications of deception theory and practice. For a broader discussion of the ethics of deception, and to see additional examples of pro-social deception visit my earlier post, here.

Parasites: Battle for Survival’, is on at the National Museum of Scotland until April 19th 2020. Entrance is free. More information is available here. Note that if you visit the museum, it also has a fantastic permanent exhibition on animal deception that I shall endeavour to review in a future post.

Argot and Opportunity

By Simon Henderson on December 18, 2019

At this time of year, it is usual to complete some form of an end-of-year quiz, so please feel free to test your knowledge about the language of deception, below!

Note that any questions you do not know the answers to provide an opportunity for you to learn more about deception by studying its practice in other domains (and almost every principle alluded to in these questions can be transferred and applied elsewhere).

You are encouraged to do the necessary research for yourself, and the correct answers are intentionally not provided here! However, please feel free to get in touch if you get stuck or are merely curious.

The Power of Patterns

By Simon Henderson on December 12, 2019

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.”

Palahniuk (1999, p. 82)

A Quick Thought Exercise

What connects the following seven cases of deception?

In 2012 a new species of spider of the genus Cyclosa was discovered that uses debris from captured prey to construct a larger simulacrum of itself at the centre of its web. The spider can vibrate its web to make the simulacrum move, thereby performing a rudimentary form of puppetry (Drake, 2012; Torres, 2012).
In March 1862, in the face of an imminent attack by Unionist forces, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston strategically placed logs that had been painted black to resemble cannon around his fieldworks in Centreville, Virginia. The apparent defence of the works was sufficient to hold-off Unionist forces, allowing Johnston’s men to withdraw to the Rappahannock River (Mills & Mills, 2008, p. 108).
In 1999 during Operation Allied Force, the Serbian military fooled Coalition aircraft into attacking plywood and canvas targets that incorporated fires to simulate thermal signatures. False bridges were constructed from scrap metal to protect real bridges. Telephone poles and old truck wheels simulated artillery pieces. Milk crates mimicked anti-aircraft missile launchers. And wooden MiG-29 aircraft decoys were used to protect real fighter aircraft (RTO Task Group SCI-131/RTG-028, 2008).
Drug dealers regularly cut their products with cheaper materials such as the anaesthetic benzocaine, to bulk-up the expensive chemicals involved. Cutting agents mimic the look, texture and taste of the more expensive chemicals (Cole et al., 2010; The Telegraph, 2016).
In 2009, the hacking group 4Chan developed automated voting software that bypassed human authentication processes and voted their founder to become Time Person of the Year on the Time Inc website. They also gamed the order of the first 21 individuals listed in the poll, so that the first letter of their first names spelt-out the message “marble cake also the game” – a reference to one of their online discussion fora (Lamere, 2009).
The website crowdsondemand.com will, for a fee, provide sizeable and specialised crowds to support “protests, rallies, advocacy, audiences, PR stunts and political events.” (crowdsondemand.com, 2019)
And in the 1990 film ‘Home Alone’, eight-year-old Kevin defends his home against burglars by creating the illusion that his house is full of people. He uses manikins with ropes attached to their limbs, life-size cardboard cutouts of people stuck to a toy train that revolves around its track, and backlighting to create animated silhouettes resembling party guests at the house’s windows (Columbus, 1990).

Spotting Patterns

One of my early deception research studies investigated what the military might learn from studying deceptive practice in other domains. The study reviewed deception in areas including magic and conjuring, animal deception, advertising and marketing, the psychic industry, scams and confidence tricks, politics, and historical cases of military deception. Later work considered a significantly broader span of domains.

As in the above examples, on first consideration cases of deception appear to differ widely from one another. However, as the study progressed, I was struck repeatedly by a strong sense of déjà vu. Cases of deception frequently seemed to mirror aspects of other cases drawn from entirely unrelated domains. For example:

A Plover simulating a broken wing to lure a fox away from its ground-nesting chicks has commonalities with the WWII Starfish decoys that lured enemy bombers away from dropping their bombs on densely populated UK cities.
A software worm that records and later plays-back standard centrifuge data while it spins the devices out-of-control causing them to explode uses the same strategies employed in a card trick that simulates precognition of a spectator’s future choices.
And Zodariidae spiders that mimic the look, behaviour and chemical properties of ants so that they can live amongst them while preying on them reflect strategies used by undercover police officers that infiltrate and collect evidence from inside a major criminal organisation.

Noticing such patterns gave rise to several useful lines of enquiry.

Learning From Patterns

“Trends, reoccurring events and circumstances. These are common ways we see patterns. Patterns are the laws of nature and life that present themselves in all disciplines of life — from the smallest microorganism to macrocosm. They manage the systems by which our universe operates. While patterns aren’t always apparent, they are continuous and autonomous.”

TEDxVCU (2017)

Having spotted a number of original patterns, whenever I came across a new one I would record it and give it a simple label such as “attract the target’s attention”, “simulate behaviour”, “swap the real for the false”, etc. As I gathered additional data on a pattern from a range of other sources, I began to better understand how it worked, and often refined and improved its label.

Early on, I noticed that specific patterns tended to occur near the start of a case of deception and manipulated a subset of psychological processes, such as affecting where the target was looking. Other patterns occurred later in the case and manipulated a different subset of processes, for example, leading the target to formulate incorrect expectations. Natural groupings of strategies, in turn, led me to construct a model of the psychological processes (and for cases of non-human deception, analogue processes) that deception manipulates to achieve its effects.

Over time it became clear that distinct strategies existed for manipulating:

Where the target looks (or attends with their other sensory systems).
What the target sees (or hears, smells, tastes, feels, etc.).
What the target thinks is happening and consequently decides to do about it.
What the target’s expectations are about the future.
How the target feels about this, and
What behaviour the target exhibits as a result.

These patterns have powerful explanatory utility but also turn-out to be helpful in a range of other ways.

Exploiting Patterns

“The way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful if one follows patterns.”

Seneca (65AD/1917, Letter 6. On Sharing Knowledge)

My work ended-up generating a generic model of the critical processes that any target (be it animal, individual human, organisation, software algorithm, etc.) uses to make sense of the world and generate action. The model was named the ‘Six Block Model’ as a result of its six primary components, and whilst it was not specific to deception, it helped structure an understanding of the basis on which all deception operates. Accompanying the model was a table of generic deception strategies (that became labelled Deception Gambits) for targeting and manipulating these different processes.

Initially, the model and strategies helped me to deconstruct and classify different cases of deception and enabled me to see the commonalities and differences between them. I soon found myself viewing deception as an entirely generic phenomenon that transcends domain, target type, target scale, and intervening technologies.

Soon after, it became clear that the strategies, if packaged appropriately, could be provided to a deception practitioner to help them conceptualise and develop a deceptive plan, whilst also enabling them to become sneakier in the process!

Over several years the system was refined and expanded to incorporate additional processes for enhancing deceptive practice, including:

Target Audience Analysis.
Deception planning.
Measurement of deceptive effect.
Deception analytics.
Counter-deception, and
A system of checks and balances for scrutinising the necessity, legality, proportionality and ethics associated with a case of deception.

Each of these processes utilised the Six Block Model and the deception patterns I had identified. And because the patterns originated within and recurred across a wide variety of different domains, the resultant system could be applied in any domain of deceptive practice, to fool any type and or scale of target that is operating within it.

An overview of the system, known as The Artifice System, can be found here.

By noticing, capturing, and appropriately packaging patterns, I found I was able to:

Recognise and understand deceptive strategies when I saw them, thereby enabling analysis, deconstruction and learning about a historical case of deception.
Better spot and recognise others’ use of deception, thereby establishing the basis of a system for counter-deception.
Design deceptive action by using the strategies as underlying building blocks.
Reuse past deception patterns to accelerate the design of new deceptive action.
Use the associated pattern language to communicate economically my thinking about deception (concepts, intent, hypotheses, etc.) to others, especially in the context of a planning team.
Graphically map and mark-up the components of a retrospective or prospective case of deception based on the pattern language, to support analytics and development of shared understanding within a planning team.
Repeatedly use the components of the Six Block Model as a simple yet powerful structure for a host of other processes, including Planning, Target Audience Analysis, Measurement of Effect, etc.

Next, I shall address how patterns may be employed to support your professional practice.

Finding Patterns in Your Professional Practice

“Finding patterns is the essence of wisdom.”

Dennis Prager, US radio talk show host.

Patterns have been identified and used to underpin and guide professional practice in many different domains, including software development (Gamma, 1995), architecture (Chelliah et al., 2017), urban planning (Alexander et al., 1977), biology (Alon, 2006), knitting (Atherley, 2015), music composition (Schlechte, 2019), etc. It is perhaps no surprise that patterns are also central to the professional practice of deception.

If you are keen to discover and exploit your own deceptive patterns (the novelty of which may be fundamental to creating competitive advantage in adversarial settings) you might wish to consider the following activities:

Spot and collect deceptive patterns from outside of your primary domain of interest. For example, make a point of studying deceptive practices employed in domains such as animal deception (Stevens, 2016), marketing and advertising (Boush et al., 2009), cyberspace (Malin et al., 2017), art forgery (Hebborn, 2004), or military deception (Rothstein & Whaley, 2013), etc. How could these patterns be applied to your domain of practice?
Spot, collect and catalogue deceptive patterns in the world around you. For example, make a point of looking out for deception next time you visit a supermarket, watch an interview with a politician, see special effects employed in a film, are surprised by a big twist in a work of fiction, spot unusual patterning on an animal, observe somebody wearing makeup, etc.
Watch a series like the Real Hustle, or films like The Sting, Catch Me If You Can, Catfish, Matchstick Men, or American Hustle, and spot patterns that recur across the different scams and confidence tricks portrayed.
Think about where such patterns may exist in other domains and try to discover connections and similarities between domains.
Read some beginner’s books on magic theory (e.g. Pogue, 1998), and practice tricks on your friends and family. Consider the relationship between theory and practice and how this relationship works in other domains. Explore how the principles and strategies of magic might help explain deceptive strategies used in other domains.
For each case of deception that you encounter, think about:
- Who or what is the target?
- What psychological processes are being manipulated to facilitate the deception?
- How are these processes manipulated?
- What outcome does this achieve?
- How could these principles be applied in your professional practice?
- And how might these patterns help you to spot and counter deception if it is used against you?

We encounter many deceptive patterns every day. If you keep your eyes (and mind) open, with practice they will become significantly easier to spot. And with some applied thought, such patterns can almost always be reused in other settings.

Concerning the Thought Exercise at the start of this post, all the cases cited involve frugal simulation of inflated mass. In each case, the deceiver attempts to inflate their size or presence using materials that are cheaper than the real thing, but that simulate it credibly to the target.

References

Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., & Silverstein, M. (1977). A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Alon, U. (2006). An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits: Chapman and Hall/CRC.

Atherley, K. (2015). The Beginner’s Guide to Writing Knitting Patterns: Learn to Write Patterns Others Can Knit. Blue Ash, OH: Interweave Press.

Boush, D. M., Friestad, M., & Wright, P. (2009). Deception In The Marketplace: The Psychology Of Deceptive Persuasion and Consumer Self-protection. New York: Routledge.

Chelliah, P. R., Subramanian, H., & Murali, A. (2017). Architectural Patterns: Uncover Essential Patterns in the Most Indispensable Realm of Enterprise Architecture: Packt Publishing Ltd.

Cole, C., Jones, L., McVeigh, J., Kicman, A., Syed, Q., & Bellis, M. A. (2010). Cut: A Guide to the Adulterants, Bulking Agents and Other Contaminants Found in Illicit Drugs. Liverpool: Centre for Public Health, Faculty of Health and Applied Social Sciences, John Moores University.

Hughes, J. (Writer) & C. Columbus (Director). (1990). Home Alone. United States: 20th Century Fox.

crowdsondemand.com. (2019). Your home for protests, rallies, advocacy, audiences, PR stunts and political events. Retrieved 09/12/2019 from https://crowdsondemand.com

Drake, N. (2012). Spider That Builds Its Own Spider Decoys Discovered. wired.com. Retrieved 21/11/2016 from https://www.wired.com/2012/12/spider-building-spider/

Gamma, E. (1995). Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Hebborn, E. (2004). The Art Forger’s Handbook. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press.

Lamere, P. (2009). Inside the Precision Hack. Retrieved 22/11/2016 from https://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-hack/

Malin, C. H., Gudaitis, T., Holt, T. J., & Kilget, M. (2017). Deception in the Digital Age: Exploiting and Defending Human Targets Through Computer-Mediated Communications. London: Academic Press.

Mills, C. A., & Mills, A. L. (2008). Alexandria, 1861-1865. Mt. Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing.

Palahniuk, C. (1999). Survivor: A Novel (1st ed.). New York: Norton.

Pogue, D. (1998). Magic For Dummies. Foster City, CA: IDG Books.

Rothstein, H., & Whaley, B. (2013). The Art and Science of Military Deception. Massachusetts, USA: Artech House.

RTO Task Group SCI-131/RTG-028. (2008). Military Impact of Future Denial and Deception. (RTO Technical Report TR-SCI-131). NATO.

Schlechte, T. (2019). A Pattern Language For Composing Music. Pike Falls, Vermont: PfCM Press.

Seneca, L. A. (65AD/1917). Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales (R. M. Gummere, Trans.). London: W. Heinemann

Stevens, M. (2016). Cheats and Deceits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

TEDxVCU. (2017). Stated theme for the TEDx conference, held at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA., February 25th 2017.

The Telegraph. (2016). Chemicals dealer ‘sold more benzocaine to cocaine gang than GlaxoSmithKlein uses in a year’. Retrieved 22/11/2016 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/12171829/Chemicals-dealer-sold-more-benzocaine-to-cocaine-gang-than-GlaxoSmithKlein-uses-in-a-year.html

Torres, P. (2012). New Species of ‘Decoy’ Spider Likely Discovered At Tambopata Research Center. Retrieved from http://blog.perunature.com/new-species-of-decoy-spider-likely-discovered-at-tambopata-research-center.html

The Ethics of Deception

By Simon Henderson on November 16, 2019

“It is vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.”
John Locke (1690). Human Understanding, Book III, Chapter X, 34.

The word ‘deception’ comes loaded with negative baggage: deception is unethical, it’s immoral, it’s bad, it’s wrong, it’s unfair, and it causes harm to its ‘victims’. Deception is vilified in most settings, including religion, relationships, work, and sport. Its practice is popularly associated with conmen, criminals, shady salespeople and a fair few politicians.

Cultural archetypes about deception are ancient and underpin deeply many societies’ values regarding right and wrong behaviour. Such archetypes include the biblical account of Adam, Eve and the apple, and Dante’s description of Hell in his The Divine Comedy. In Dante’s work, the eighth, and penultimate circle of Hell, ‘Fraud’, is reserved for Fraudsters. Counterfeiters, hypocrites, grafters (conmen), seducers, and sorcerers (magicians) are viewed as the very vilest of sinners and are consigned to the deepest, innermost, and very worst circle in all of Hell – the ninth circle, ‘Treachery’.

Deception is a transactional relationship in which a deceiver gains advantage from the resultant behaviour of their target. Amongst a range of positions arguing that deception is unethical, one of the strongest is that deceptive transactions occur without the target’s consent. Such consent may either be declared explicitly by the target or is implied by the context in which the transaction takes place. For example, audience members paying to watch a magic show are considered to have consented implicitly to being deceived by the magician – although this is an assumption that is itself fraught with complexity and subjectivity.

Importantly, the absence of consent does not, in and of itself, render a transaction unethical. Acting upon individuals or groups without their consent may be considered ethical if such actions ultimately benefit the ‘greater good’ (ad maius bonum, and pro bono publico). In these cases, the target themselves, others they interact with, or society more broadly benefits from the outcome of the deception.

Examples abound of people being influenced, coerced or acted upon without their consent with the intent that such actions contribute to the greater good. For example, children are, without their consent (frequently withdrawing it) made to eat their greens. Criminals are, without consent, sent to jail to protect society, to teach them a lesson, and to rehabilitate them. And people’s journeys to work are, without their consent, routinely disrupted by roadworks so that more parts of the country benefit from fibre broadband.

Similarly, there are countless examples of benevolent applications of deception. Critically, the very same strategies that underpin malevolent applications can be employed benevolently to do good, bringing about a significant benefit to the target and or to others upon whom the target has an impact.

Some examples of ethical deception include:

An oncologist deceiving a patient’s cancer cells into binding with decoy molecules that misdirect and lessen the spread of the disease.
An endocrinologist who treats a patient’s obesity with a course of Semaglutide injections, that hijacks the body’s appetite levels by mimicking a hormone released after eating a filling meal.
A neurologist administering a placebo to lessen dramatically the impact of Parkinson’s disease on a patient’s motor control functions.
People with a missing limb using a prosthetic to increase functionality and reduce stigmatisation.
Use of hormones to deceive female mosquitos into believing that they have already mated, thereby disrupting their reproductive cycle and reducing the spread of malaria (mosquitos only mate once, and the parasite Plasmodium Falciparum is only spread by females that bite to obtain blood to nurture their eggs).
Using odours to overload, desensitize and disrupt mosquitos’ carbon dioxide detection machinery, thereby masking human breath and preventing the insects from detecting and infecting human hosts.
Simulated wooden furniture that is made from recycled plastic to increase durability, prolong usage, and reduce cost.
Warfighters fooling their enemy into surrendering without the need for bloodshed.
An undercover police unit infiltrating and disrupting a people trafficking and modern slavery operation.
Cybersecurity specialists tricking a hacker into disclosing their real identity, leading to an arrest and the protection of critical information (such as individuals’ personal health records).
Increases in self-confidence and self-esteem resulting from wearing concealer, makeup, lipstick, high heels, slimming clothing, accentuated clothing, perfume, etc.
Bluffing in poker, feints in fencing, sacrifices in chess, dummy runners in rugby, dummy free kickers in football (soccer), dummy plays in American football, disguised drop-shots in tennis, badminton and squash, cycling coaches giving their cyclists modified GPS watches that show artificially low power output, pace and mileage, to promote surreptitiously overtraining and increased performance, etc.
A writer crafting a novel with a huge twist at its climax.
A filmmaker using special effects to create amazing scenery which does not, and can not exist for real.
An audio engineer who re-records an actor’s dialogue for added clarity months after shooting has wrapped then dubs this onto the movie soundtrack.
Parents spinning their children tales about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny.
The white lie all of us regularly tell to make somebody feel good.

This is only a small set of examples. Cases of pro-social deception exist everywhere one looks, yet we rarely notice, let alone consider these positive applications of deception.

Deception is value-neutral. Instead of responding with a knee-jerk negative reaction to the mere presence of deception, careful ethical scrutiny should instead consider:

the intent behind the deception,
the justification for its use (necessity, legality, proportionality, etc),
how it was planned,
how it was executed,
the effects it achieved (positive and or negative), and
the resultant outcome (positive or negative).

Deception is like a house brick. You can use it to build somebody a house, or you can use it to hit them over the head. The house brick itself has no intrinsic ethical value. It is how the brick is used and how deception is used that both necessitate ethical inquiry.

Reginald Scott alluded well to the dual potential inherent in deception in the title of Book 13, Chapter 12 of his 1584 work, The Discoverie of Witchcraft:

“Of illusions, confederacies, and legierdemaine, and how they maybe well or ill used.” (Original Elizabethan grammar and spelling).
Reginald Scott (1584). The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Booke 13, The Twelfe Chapter, p.307

Defining Deception

By Simon Henderson on November 5, 2019

In seeking to develop an understanding of deception, perhaps an obvious place to start is with a dictionary definition of the term. However, dictionaries turn-out to be surprisingly poor sources for those seeking clarity on the topic. For example, the Oxford Dictionary of English defines deception as:

“[To] deliberately cause (someone) to believe something that is not true, especially for personal gain.”
Oxford English Dictionary (2016)

This definition falls short in several respects. First, it implies that truth or falsehood is a binary either-or state (i.e. things are true, or not true), and does not consider the possibility of varying degrees of truth, partial truths, subjective truths, contested truths, and unknown truths (for an excellent exposition of the complex nature of truth, see MacDonald, 2018). A second problem is that the definition cannot accommodate situations in which a deceiver wishes their target to not believe a situation that is true. The definition, therefore, is unable to accommodate situations in which an entity is operating covertly, and wishes the target to have no suspicion, let alone belief as to their real identity or behaviour. A third, more fundamental problem with this definition is that it is entirely feasible to deceive a target without lying and by communicating using nothing but the truth. This form of deceptive strategy is referred to as ‘paltering’ (Rogers et al., 2017), and can be lingual or temporal. This important and often overlooked fact highlights the limited utility and value of lying and lie-detection paradigms for making sense of the broader field of deception.

Some years ago, I formulated a working definition of deception that sought to address these concerns and set the notion of deception against a more contemporary, pragmatic and practical psychological foundation. Over the intervening years, the definition has remained extant in the face of extensive road-testing, critique and utilisation by many hundreds of deception practitioners from across a wide variety of different professional domains. Deception is defined as:

“Deliberate measures to induce erroneous sensemaking and subsequent behaviour within a target audience, to achieve and exploit an advantage.”
Henderson (2011)

Let us consider the different components of this definition:

Deception is a Deliberate Act. The definition begins by suggesting that deception is a deliberate and intentional act, a view shared with a range of other authors and researchers in the field (such as Buller & Burgoon, 1994; Galasinski, 2000; Caspi & Gorsky, 2006; Carrion et al., 2010). As a result, activities that unintentionally or accidentally induce erroneous sensemaking are non-deceptive acts that should more accurately be labelled as mistakes, misinterpretations, misunderstandings, gaffs, etc. It is therefore not possible to deceive by accident.

Deception is Induced. Deception is brought about via a process of induction. A deceiver deliberately engages in a specific action or actions that are intended to fool the target. Deception does not, and cannot, happen by itself.

Deception Works by Inducing Errors in Sensemaking. A key component of this definition relates to the notion of ‘erroneous sensemaking’, meaning that some aspect of the target’s understanding of the world is deliberately led to be wrong, or in error. It is this focus on error that differentiates deception from other related concepts, such as influence, persuasion or coercion, etc. For an explanation of how sensemaking functions, see Klein et al. (2006b, 2006a); and Klein et al. (2007).

The Goal of Deception is Behaviour Change. Deception aims to change the future behaviour of the target. If there is no behavioural change in the target resulting from their erroneous sensemaking, the same outcome could and would have been achieved by the deceiver doing nothing.

Deception is Directed Towards a Defined Target Audience. Deception is directed towards a specific, identified and bounded target audience. The deception target may be an individual, a team, an organisation, a larger grouping of organisations, and potentially even a higher-level collective entity such as a nation-state. A target may also comprise any system that exhibits some form of behaviour, and within which behaviour change may be sought, including computer software, an algorithm, hardware control systems, etc.

Successful Deception Creates Advantage for the Deceiver, and Sometimes the Target. Deception is conducted to obtain an exploitable advantage for the deceiver, and can also result in mutual benefit, wherein both the deceiver and the target gain benefit when the deception is successful.

This definition is by no means ‘the answer’ (i.e. a fully-formed, unambiguous encapsulation and articulation of precisely what deception ‘is’!). Nonetheless, the definition provides a stable foundation that helps bound the topic of interest, upon which a range of other theoretical and practical deceptive components can be built.

References

Buller, D. B., & Burgoon, J. K. (1994). Deception: Strategic and Nonstrategic Communication. In J. A. Daly & J. M. Wiemann (Eds.), Strategic Interpersonal Communication (pp. 191-223). Lawrence Erlbaum: Hillsdale, New Jersey.

Carrion, R. E., Keenan, J. P., & Sebanz, N. (2010). A Truth That’s Told With Bad Intent: An ERP Study of Deception. Cognition, 114(1), 105-110

Caspi, A., & Gorsky, P. (2006). Online Deception – Prevelence Motivation and Emotion. Cyber Psychology and Behavior, 9(1), 54-59.

Galasinski, D. (2000). The Language of Deception: A Discourse Analytical Study. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.

Henderson, S. M. (2011). Deceptive Thinking Workshop. Paper presented at the 1st MilDec Military Deception Symposium, 2nd-3rd November 2011, Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham.

Klein, G., Moon, B., & Hoffman, R. R. (2006a). Making Sense of Sensemaking 1: Alternative Perspectives. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 21(4), 70-73.

Klein, G., Moon, B., & Hoffman, R. R. (2006b). Making Sense of Sensemaking 2: A Macrocognitive Model. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 21(5), 88-92.

Klein, G., Philips, J. K., Rall, E. L., & Peluso, D. A. (2007). A Data-Frame Theory of Sensemaking. In R. Hoffman (Ed.), Expertise Out of Context: Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Naturalistic Decision MakingNew York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 113-155.

MacDonald, H. (2018). Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Oxford English Dictionary. (2016). Definition of ‘Deception’. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rogers, T., Zeckhauser, R., Gino, F., Norton, M. I., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2017). Artful Paltering: The Risks and Rewards of Using Truthful Statements to Mislead Others. J Pers Soc Psychol, 112(3), 456-473.

From the Microbial to the Geopolitical

By Simon Henderson on November 4, 2019

Deception exists throughout life. It occurs at all levels from the microbial to the geopolitical, and in every environment, including terrestrial, aquatic, and airborne settings. Bacteria employ molecular mimicry to trick their hosts into letting them enter cells so that they can survive long enough to reproduce. Plants use scent and visual mimicry to attract, predate on, and pollinate using insects, and employ a wide variety of different forms of deception, also for survival and reproduction. Deception is used by fish, reptiles, amphibians, arthropods, birds and mammals, with many different systems of deceptive signalling and behaviour that take place across a broad span of the electromagnetic spectrum. Children learn to lie at an early age, and the emergence of plausible lying is indicative that they are employing higher-level cognitive functions. Such functions include theory of mind (the ability to conceive the world from the perspective of others), and the construction of narrative (both skills that are fundamental to all human deception).

Deception can be found in almost every area of human endeavour, including advertising and marketing, archaeology, art, confidence tricks, fashion, forgery, fraud, gambling, health, intelligence, linguistics, magic, military deception, music, product packaging, politics, practical jokes, the psychic industry, science, social engineering, special effects, sport (as a legitimate tactic, and as cheating), theatre, and many other areas. Increasingly, deception is becoming highly prevalent in cyberspace, where humans fool humans, software fools humans, humans fool software and software fools other software.

Deception can be used malevolently, resulting in the target (i.e. the focus or object of the deception) suffering some form of disadvantage, such as a scam that steals their money. However, deception can also be used benevolently, where the target benefits from being deceived. Benevolent, pro-social deception occurs in art, comedy, drama, education, entertainment, fashion, beauty, make-up, gambling, magic, medicine, parenting, practical jokes, sport, storytelling & fiction, theatre, trompe l’oeil, visual effects, white lies, etc.

For example, in a pharmaceutical application, a foul-tasting and inedible cough mixture might be ‘repackaged’ using pleasant flavouring as a ‘wrapper’, so that the medicine becomes palatable and can be ingested by a patient to treat the symptoms of their cough. Interestingly, the deceptive strategies employed in all benevolent applications are precisely the same as those underpinning cases of malevolent deception. The dual potential of such strategies raises a range of important issues concerning the ethics of deception – a topic to be addressed in future postings.

From the partial selection of domains identified above, one can begin to appreciate the vast span of environments and forms in which deception occurs to create an advantage for the deceiver, and frequently for the target too. But does anything link together these different forms of deception? What are the common threads, and where are there differences? Later posts will address these issues.

Hello There!

By Simon Henderson on October 24, 2019

This site is intended to act as a repository for some of my thinking about deception and counter-deception. I’ll use some initial essays to set the scene and scope-out my broad areas of interest, and hope in later essays to discuss (most likely, on a somewhat sporadic basis) a mixture of theory, practice, case studies and contemporary news stories about deception.

I hope you can find something interesting here. Please feel free to comment on any posts of interest, or to get in touch via the contact form.

Cheers,
Simon

The Festive Deceptive Quiz

A Quick Thought Exercise

Spotting Patterns

Learning From Patterns

Exploiting Patterns

Finding Patterns in Your Professional Practice

References

References