Lies, Lies, and Lies. On Truth, Dishonesty, Deception, and Self-Deception

True lies: self-stabilization without self-deception.

Self-deception entails apparent conceptual paradoxes and poses the dilemma between two competing needs: the need for stability of the self-concept, on the one hand, and the need to accept reality, on the other. It is argued, first, that conceptual difficulties can be avoided by distinguishing two levels of explanation. Whereas, in a personal language, "the person" deceives him- or her-self, a c...

Real Lies, White Lies and Gray Lies: Towards a Typology of Deception

Prosocial lies: When deception breeds trust

Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have long asserted that deception harms trust. We challenge this claim. Across four studies, we demonstrate that deception can increase trust. Specifically, prosocial lies increase the willingness to pass money in the trust game, a behavioral measure of benevolence-based trust. In Studies 1a and 1b, we find that altruistic lies increase trust when dec...

Truth, Lies and Bullshit distinguishing classes of dishonesty

In this paper, we distinguish three important classes of dishonesty that can occur in multi-agent systems, as well as in human society. In particular, the distinction is being made between lies and bullshit, following the work of Harry Frankfurt. The difference is that someone who tells a lie has access to the truth, whereas the concept of bullshit requires no knowledge of the truth at all. Tha...

Truth, Lies and BS; distinguishing classes of dishonesty

In this paper we distinguish three classes of dishonesty: lies, bullshit and deception. We show how these classes can be modelled in classical epistemic logic (S5) as well as in formal argumentation. A lie, in its most simple form, can be defined as the utterence of a statement which the speaker knows not to be true. That is, an agent X is lying on proposition p iff the following holds: utters ...