Who's the deceiver? Identifying deceptive intentions in communication

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Blazquiz-Pulido, Juan Francisco; Polonio, Luca; Bilancini, Ennio
• 署名单位: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca; Universitat d'Alacant; University of Milano-Bicocca
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2024.02.006
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 451-466
• 关键词: Deception; Lying; strategic communication; Sender-receiver game; trust

摘要

Recognizing people's deceptive intentions when communicating is crucial to detect statements that may drive us to unintended harmful decisions. This paper studies individuals' intentions in games where players can tell the truth with deceiving purposes. In a preregistered experiment, we combine a sender-receiver game with possible strategic considerations and the associated belief elicitation questionnaire, with a sender-receiver game with no room for strategic considerations. We propose a new method that improves the identification of senders' intentions to deceive. Our findings reveal that relying solely on the strategic sender-receiver game and the elicited beliefs, as previously proposed in the literature, can lead to misinterpreting the actual intentions of a substantial proportion of senders. In particular, our new method helps discern actual deceivers from pessimistic truth-tellers and identifies senders who try to excuse their previous deceiving message. All in all, our method identifies more senders with deceptive intentions compared to previous methods.