Lie to Me: Lying Virtual Agents

The objective of this thesis was to endow agents with the ability to model the mind of other agents and to use this information on their reasoning process. We developed an architecture which enables N levels of Theory of Mind. Additionally we wanted to assess if a reasoning ability capable of more then one level would be perceived as more socially intelligent than one with only one level. For this purpose we focused our work on deception behaviour generation. Key concepts from the field of Psychology were reviewed regarding this topic, while some works which tried to implement a similar goal were also mentioned. A case study was developed to compared liars with one level and second level Theory of Mind. The evaluation itself was composed of preliminary, simulation and a final questionnaire. The results showed to be consistent with our hypothesis that the more reasoning abstraction level of a Theory of Mind, the better agents can performed deceptive tasks.