The psychology of human deception - Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception

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 if it is true. One can draw inferences from a false proposition Wittgenstein [1921] 1971, p. 41).

ALTHOUGH 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 and rely on normative presuppositions and inferencing processes essential to honest communication and the attainment 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 interpersonally accepted roles and norms, and that the addressor is sincerely making his or her communicative intentions evident to the addressee.(1) 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. Conventions 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 Lewis (1969, p. 78) maintains, a convention exists because "almost everyone" conforms to a regularity, and because "almost everyone expects almost everyone else" to conform to the regularity. We presuppose that a speaker is telling the truth, is sincere, and is acting in accordance with norms because we expect that "almost everyone conforms" to our conventional regularities. If a conventional regularity is to remain conventional, most people within the community must conform to the regularity, which results in sincerity, truth-telling, and norms, as well as our consequent presuppositions about them. There can, of course, be conventions of insincerity and falseness,(2) but even here the fact that everyone knows of the insincerity and falseness creates a paradoxical form of sincerity and truthfulness in that no one is deceived and everyone knows how to interpret the convention. More commonly, the expectation that a speaker is sincerely presenting his or her intentions is implicit but not activated in normal speaking (Millikan, 1984, p. 67-9) and, like the other validity claims of Habermas, remains implicit unless the communication would be incomprehensible without its elucidation.

The deceiver who wishes to remain undiscovered must appear to satisfy these validity claims without making the victim suspicious, because the victim is unlikely to think about the validity claims unless he or she is made suspicious.(3) The more the deceiver relies on the victim's implicit assumptions and the less the victim infers motivation on the deceiver's part in setting up the signs of regularity and preying on the victim's implicit assumptions, the less likely is the victim to become suspicious. For example, to avoid victims' inferring motivation, criminals set up scams in which large parcels of money are found "accidentally" to get victims engaged in money-laundering schemes (Blum, 1972).