Belief Manipulation Research Articles

Information War - International Security Dilemma in the Modern World

In the modern world, in the field of international security, one of the important challenges is the information war. On the other hand, information is a universal and cheap weapon with a limitless scope and high efficiency. Therefore, it can be more dangerous than any conventional means of warfare. During its implementation, the attacking side achieves the desired outcome through the psychological manipulation of common beliefs. During the last ten years, the rate of disinformation has increased sharply. Also, propaganda, espionage, uncontrolled dissemination of state secrets and personal information, massive cyber-attacks and so on. Both states and terrorist organizations use such mechanisms. Today, the most functional means of information in this field are used by terrorist organizations, which often use social media to recruit so-called “Islamic Fighters” and lay out fundamentalism. Cooperation at the international and regional levels is important in fighting cybercrime and protecting critical information infrastructure. For this purpose, within the framework of the Council of Europe, the European Union, the United Nations, NATO, and other international organizations, it carries out active activities on cyber security topics. In addition, protecting against cyber intrusion, even on a small scale, is in the country’s national security interests, and it is crucial to involve each state in the proceeding discussion about information warfare.

Eye did this! Sense of agency in eye movements

This study investigates the sense of agency (SoA) for saccades with implicit and explicit agency measures. In two eye tracking experiments, participants moved their eyes towards on-screen stimuli that subsequently changed color. Participants then either reproduced the temporal interval between saccade and color-change (Experiment 1) or reported the time points of these events with an auditory Libet clock (Experiment 2) to measure temporal binding effects as implicit indices of SoA. Participants were either made to believe to exert control over the color change or not (agency manipulation). Explicit ratings indicated that the manipulation of causal beliefs and hence agency was successful. However, temporal binding was only evident for caused effects, and only when a sufficiently sensitive procedure was used (auditory Libet clock). This suggests a feebler connection between temporal binding and SoA than previously proposed. The results also provide evidence for a relatively fast acquisition of sense of agency for previously never experienced types of action-effect associations. This indicates that the underlying processes of action control may be rooted in more intricate and adaptable cognitive models than previously thought. Oculomotor SoA as addressed in the present study presumably represents an important cognitive foundation of gaze-based social interaction (social sense of agency) or gaze-based human-machine interaction scenarios. Public significance statementIn this study, sense of agency for eye movements in the non-social domain is investigated in detail, using both explicit and implicit measures. Therefore, it offers novel and specific insights into comprehending sense of agency concerning effects induced by eye movements, as well as broader insights into agency pertaining to entirely newly acquired types of action-effect associations. Oculomotor sense of agency presumably represents an important cognitive foundation of gaze-based social interaction (social agency) or gaze-based human-machine interaction scenarios. Due to peculiarities of the oculomotor domain such as the varying degree of volitional control, eye movements could provide new information regarding more general theories of sense of agency in future research.

Predicting others’ actions from their social contexts

Contextual cues have been shown to inform our understanding and predictions of others’ actions. In this study, we tested whether observers’ predictions about unfolding actions depend upon the social context in which they occur. Across five experiments, we showed participants videos of an actor walking toward a piece of furniture either with (joint context) or without (solo context) a partner standing by it. We found greater predictive bias, indicative of stronger action expectations when videos contained a second actor (Experiment 1), even when the solo condition had a perceptually-matched control object in place of the actor (Experiment 2). Critically, belief manipulations about the actions the walking actor would perform suppressed the difference between social context conditions when the manipulation specified an action possible in both contexts (Experiment 5) but not when the action was one that would be difficult without a partner (Experiment 4). Interestingly, the social context effect persisted when the belief manipulation specified an unlikely action given the depicted scene (Experiment 3). These findings provide novel evidence that kinematically-identical actions can elicit different predictions depending on the social context in which they occur.

Doubts about the model and optimal policy

This paper analyzes optimal policy in setups where both the policymaker and the private sector have doubts about the probability model of uncertainty and form endogenous worst-case beliefs. There are two forces that shape optimal policy results: a) the manipulation of the endogenous beliefs of the private sector so that the forward-looking constraints that the policymaker is facing are relaxed, b) the discrepancy (if any) in pessimistic beliefs between a paternalistic policymaker and the private sector, which captures ultimately differences in welfare evaluation. I illustrate the methodology in an optimal fiscal policy problem and show that manipulation of beliefs materializes as an effort to make government debt cheaper through the endogenous beliefs of the household. This force may lead to either mitigation or amplification of the household's pessimism, depending on the problem's parameters. The policymaker's relative pessimism determines whether paternalism reinforces or opposes the price manipulation incentives.

A Dynamic Game Framework for Rational and Persistent Robot Deception With an Application to Deceptive Pursuit-Evasion

This article studies rational and persistent deception among intelligent robots to enhance security and operational efficiency. We present an <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -player <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -stage game with an asymmetric information structure where each robot’s private information is modeled as a random variable or its type. The deception is persistent as each robot’s private type remains unknown to other robots for all stages. The deception is rational as robots aim to achieve their deception goals at minimum cost. Each robot forms a dynamic belief of others’ types based on intrinsic or extrinsic information. Perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium (PBNE) is a natural solution concept for dynamic games of incomplete information. Due to its requirements of sequential rationality and belief consistency, PBNE provides a reliable prediction of players’ actions, beliefs, and expected cumulative costs over the entire <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> stages. The contribution of this work is fourfold. First, we identify the PBNE computation as a nonlinear stochastic control problem and characterize the structures of players’ actions and costs under PBNE. We further derive a set of extended Riccati equations with cognitive coupling under the linear-quadratic (LQ) setting and extrinsic belief dynamics. Second, we develop a receding-horizon algorithm with low temporal and spatial complexity to compute PBNE under intrinsic belief dynamics. Third, we investigate a deceptive pursuit-evasion game as a case study and use numerical experiments to corroborate the results. Finally, we propose metrics, such as deceivability, reachability, and the price of deception (PoD), to evaluate the strategy design and the system performance under deception. Note to Practitioners—Recent advances in automation and adaptive control in multi-agent systems enable robots to use deception to accomplish their objectives. Deception involves intentional information hiding to compromise the security and operational efficiency of the robotic systems. This work proposes a dynamic game framework to quantify the impact of deception, understand the robots’ behaviors and intentions, and design cost-efficient strategies under the deception that persists over stages. Existing research studies on robot deception have relied on experiments while this work aims to lay a theoretical foundation of deception with quantitative metrics, such as deceivability and the PoD. The proposed model has wide applications, including cooperative robots, pursuit and evasion, and human–robot teaming. The pursuit-evasion games are used as case studies to show how the deceiver can amplify the deception by belief manipulation and how the deceived robots can reduce the negative impact of deception by enhanced maneuverability and Bayesian learning. The future work would focus on designing cooperative deception among swarm robotics and robotic systems that are robust to or further benefit from the deception.

Sorting expertise

We analyze the optimal sorting of experts who differ in their ability to acquire information, into production teams. Once a team is formed, experts individually acquire information about the joint project, communicate the information they acquired, and then engage in team production. Misalignment of preferences at the production stage creates incentives for belief manipulation at the communication stage. We show that the cost associated with misaligned incentives is minimized if experts of similar abilities are placed in the same team. Consequently, surplus maximization may lead to non-diversified teams, even if in the absence of misaligned incentives optimal sorting is negative assortative. Thus, our analysis provides a novel rationale for creation of non-diversified teams of experts.

Privacy-Preserving POMDP Planning via Belief Manipulation

The privacy issue has become one of the most critical concerns in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) as CPSs are vulnerable to information leakage. In particular, a passive intruder could infer the secret information of the system through observations, and the system may be critically compromised or damaged once the intruder has high confidence on certain secret states. In this paper, we investigate the planning problem of a stochastic system in the presence of a passive eavesdropping intruder. In this system, the planner is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP) who can access the state information and control the system transition. The intruder, who has a partial observation of the system state, is modeled as a hidden Markov model. The goal of the intruder is to infer the secrets of the system in terms of whether the current system is in some sensitive states, and the goal of the defender is to maximize the reward while preventing the intruder from inferring the secret. Distinct from existing work that embedded privacy as a part of the reward or utility function, we quantify privacy as a constraint for the planning. The problem is formulated as a constrained partially observable MDP (POMDP) planning problem and a belief state partition approach is proposed to solve the privacy-preserving planning problem via value iteration. Our observation is that the defender could prevent the intruder from inferring sensitive information via belief manipulation. However, the introduction of the privacy concern may sacrifice the system performance or even cause the problem to be infeasible. A necessary and sufficient condition is given to check the feasibility of the planning problem and examples are shown to illustrate our proposed algorithm.

Effects of online continuum and categorical belief manipulations on schizophrenia stigma, help-seeking, and help-provision

Most research investigating the effect of continuum beliefs on stigma has used weak manipulations which may contribute to mixed findings within the experimental literature. There is also a lack of research into how continuum belief manipulations may impact help-seeking and help-provision. This study used an online manipulation of continuum and categorical beliefs about schizophrenia to examine the subsequent impacts on stigma, help-seeking, and help-provision. A total of 271 participants were randomised into either a continuum, categorical, or control condition. Participants received an informational video, a magazine article, and research highlights relevant to their condition. Prosocial support behaviour was assessed through a novel volunteering measure. The magnitude of change between pre-intervention and post-intervention measures of continuum and categorical beliefs was large. Continuum presentations reduced prognostic pessimism and negative stereotyping. Meanwhile, categorical presentations increased prognostic pessimism. Participants across conditions showed increased help-providing intentions after removing the highest scores to avoid ceiling effects. Fear and blame also decreased significantly across all conditions. There was no difference between conditions on our novel volunteer help-provision measure. Our findings have implications for anti-stigma programs and may help inform the design of future continuum belief manipulations.

Capitalism, laws, and the need for trustworthy institutions

Abstract Debates on capitalism get muddled by blind spots about essential institutions, particularly effective governments and legal systems that enable corporations to exist in their current form and markets to succeed at scale. Across regimes, incentives to maximize profits and power play key roles in determining outcomes, and all institutions are vulnerable to distortions from imbalances in control, information, and expertise. The key problems with capitalism today boil down to failed governance and confusions that obscure the issues and prevent beneficial changes. In recent decades, the forces of ‘free-market capitalism’ have undermined and overwhelmed democratic institutions, leading to intertwined crises in both capitalism and democracy. Deception and the manipulation of beliefs often distort both markets and political systems. The financial system illustrates starkly how key institutions have failed society and how flawed narratives enable recklessness and bad rules to persist. Fixing capitalism must start with seeing the challenges for what they are. The devil is then in the details of improving transparency, norms, rules, and civic engagement so as to prevent the abuse of power and to create more trustworthy and less corruptible versions of capitalism.

Tight cultures and vengeful gods: How culture shapes religious belief.

Billions of people from around the world believe in vengeful gods who punish immoral behavior. These punitive religious beliefs may foster prosociality and contribute to large-scale cooperation, but little is known about how these beliefs emerge and why people adopt them in the first place. We present a cultural-psychological model suggesting that cultural tightness-the strictness of cultural norms and normative punishment-helps to catalyze punitive religious beliefs by increasing people's motivation to punish norm violators. Our model also suggests that tightness mediates the impact of ecological threat on punitive belief, explaining why punitive religious beliefs are most common in regions with high levels of ecological threat. Five multimethod studies support these predictions. Studies 1-3 focus on the effect of cultural tightness on punitive religious beliefs. Historical increases in cultural tightness precede and predict historical increases in punitive beliefs (Study 1), and both manipulating people's support for tightness (Study 2) and placing people in a simulated tight society (Study 3) increase punitive religious beliefs via the personal motivation to punish norm violators. Studies 4-5 focus on whether cultural tightness mediates the link between ecological threat and punitive religious beliefs. Cultural tightness helps explain why U.S. states with high ecological threat (e.g., natural hazards, scarcity) have the highest levels of punitive religious beliefs (Study 4) and why experimental manipulations of threat increase punitive religious beliefs (Study 5). Past research has shown how religion impacts culture, but our studies show how culture can shape religion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Capitalism, Laws, and the Need for Trustworthy Institutions

This article responds to the question: Capitalism: What has gone wrong, what needs to change and how to fix it for a special volume on capitalism in Oxford Review of Economic Policy. Debates on capitalism get muddled by blind spots about essential institutions, particularly effective governments and legal systems that enable corporations to exist in their current form and markets to succeed at scale. Across regimes, incentives to maximize profits and power play key roles in determining outcomes, and all institutions are vulnerable to distortions from imbalances in control, information, and expertise. The key problems with capitalism today boil down to failed governance and confusions that obscure the issues and prevent beneficial changes. In recent decades, the forces of “free-market capitalism” have undermined and overwhelmed democratic institutions, leading to intertwined crises in both capitalism and democracy. Deception and the manipulation of beliefs often distort both markets and political systems. The financial system illustrates starkly how key institutions have failed society and how flawed narratives enable recklessness and bad rules to persist. Fixing capitalism must start with seeing the challenges for what they are. The devil is then in the details of improving transparency, norms, rules, and civic engagement so as to prevent the abuse of power and to create more trustworthy and less corruptible versions of capitalism.

Practical Specification of Belief Manipulation in Games

Actions that affect knowledge asymmetrically between agents occur in numerous domains, from card games such as poker to the secure transmission of information. Applications in such domains often depend on reflection over knowledge, including what an agent knows about what other agents know. We are interested in enabling formal specification of these systems which may be used for executable prototyping as well as verification and other formal reasoning. Dynamic Epistemic Logic provides a formal basis for such reasoning, but is often prohibitively cumbersome to use in practice. We present an implementation and macro system called Ostari, backed by a particular flavor of Dynamic Epistemic Logic, which allows us to scale the ideas to more realistic problems. We demonstrate how actions that manipulate agents' beliefs can be written concisely and how this capability can be applied to modeling a popular card game by utilizing our system's ability to execute action sequences, answer queries about knowledge states, and find action sequences to satisfy a particular goal.

Past adversity protects against the numeracy bias in compassion.

Past research has suggested that one problematic limitation of compassion is its seeming resistance to increase in response to growing numbers of targets in distress. This insensitivity to numeracy results in the dampening of compassion when faced with mass suffering. Given that emerging evidence suggests that facing past adversity in life may foster compassion and a general prosocial orientation, we explored whether those who have experienced greater adversity show a resistance to this numeracy bias. In a series of 4 experiments, we demonstrate not only that those who have experienced greater adversity readily overcome the numeracy bias in compassion, but also that beliefs regarding their ability to be efficacious in helping others underlie this link. Of import, we also show that direct manipulation of such efficacy beliefs can remove the numeracy bias in compassion typically found among those who have not endured significant life adversity. Finally, we explore the ability of adversity to engender prosocial donations to those in need via mechanisms involving compassion and efficacy beliefs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Self-Deception: Adopting False Beliefs for a Favorable Self-View

This paper demonstrates how people deceive themselves into thinking of themselves as altruistic. I present a lab experiment in which subjects need to decide whether to behave altruistically or selfishly in an ambiguous environment. Due to the nature of ambiguity in this environment, those who are pessimistic have a legitimate reason to behave selfishly, even if they are inherently altruistic. For people who are inherently selfish but like to think of themselves as altruistic, this environment can serve as a scapegoat for selfish behavior. That is, by falsely claiming to be pessimistic, individuals can behave selfishly without damaging their self-image of being altruistic. Through two seemingly unrelated experimental tasks, I elicit subjects’ adopted beliefs and true beliefs about the same probability. I find that selfish subjects adopt beliefs that are systematically more pessimistic beliefs than their true beliefs, whereas altruistic subjects adopt beliefs that are in alignment with their true beliefs. The most plausible explanation for why only selfish subjects manipulate their beliefs is that selfish behavior damages their self-image and belief manipulation helps them mitigate that damage; altruistic subjects, by contrast, have no such need for belief manipulation because their behavior does not damage their self-image.

On self-serving strategic beliefs

We experimentally study whether individuals adopt negative beliefs about others' intentions to justify egoistic behavior. Our first study compares the beliefs held by players with such an incentive to the beliefs of neutral observers and finds no evidence that individuals engage in “strategic cynicism.” This contrasts with other recent evidence demonstrating that people hold less positive beliefs about others when doing so allows them to act more self-interestedly. We reconcile the discrepancy, using a simple model of belief manipulation and a novel experiment that replicates and extends the earlier findings. Across three datasets, we find no evidence of negatively biased beliefs in absolute terms. However, those with a greater incentive to view others' intentions cynically exhibit relatively less positive beliefs. Our contribution expands our understanding of the psychological forces underlying self-serving belief manipulation, by noting that strategic cynicism may compete with a tendency towards positivity in determining individuals' beliefs.

Experimental manipulation of beliefs about the importance of thoughts and the effect on an aggressive impulse.

Cognitive models of obsessive-compulsive disorder attribute a causal role to maladaptive beliefs. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated Overimportance of Thoughts (OT) beliefs and experimentally evaluated their effect on the response to an induced aggressive impulse. Eighty-five participants completed a battery of self-report instruments assessing obsession symptoms, thought control, affectivity and obsessive beliefs, and were then randomly assigned to two conditions. In the experimental condition participants read a scientific abstract on the importance of thought control whilst those in the control condition read a neutral abstract. All participants identified a loved person and imagined feeling the impulse to stab this person, then completed again OT beliefs measures (Overimportance of Thought, Moral-Thought Action Fusion and Thought Action Fusion Likelihood). The Moral component of the Thought Action Fusion was reduced by reading a brief text about the possibility and desirability of thought control. However, experimentally induced changes in beliefs did not yield differences in the intrusiveness of the aggressive impulse. Some beliefs can be modified through a single session in which information similar to what could be obtained in quotidian life is provided.

The optimal solution to a principal-agent problem with unknown agent ability

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>We investigate a principal-agent model featured with unknown agent ability. Under the exponential utilities, the necessary and sufficient conditions of the incentive contract are derived by utilizing the martingale and variational methods, and the solutions of the optimal contracts are obtained by using the stochastic maximum principle. The ability uncertainty reduces the principal's ability of incentive provision. It is shown that as time goes by, the information about the ability accumulates, giving the agent less space for belief manipulation, and incentive provision will become easier. Namely, as the contractual time tends to infinity (long-term), the agent ability is revealed completely, the ability uncertainty disappears, and the optimal contracts under known and unknown ability become identical.

Learning, belief manipulation and optimal relationship termination

We study a dynamic agency problem in which a principal and an agent interact on a project repeatedly with the agent’s ability initially unknown to both players. Because an incompetent agent generates successes less frequently and thereby needs to be rewarded more generously for his successes, the agent has attempts to “play dumb” by shirking deliberately. We show that the principal can incentivize the agent by resorting to a combination of wage payments and relationship termination. In equilibrium, relationship termination is introduced in the contracts only when the players’ assessment about the agent’s ability is above a threshold. As a result, the dynamic agency cost presents a non-monotonic relationship with the agent’s ability.

The cultural value of Vilnius City Opera

This article explores the public showcasing of “Vilnius City Opera” in cyberspace in order to experience demonstrate the cultural value of theatre. This communication phenomenon, the Internet, is chosen as the basis of the study, as it is considered a very important socio-cultural instrument in today’s world, influencing, building and maintaining relationships to meet needs, and offering new alternatives, thus creating a community of close, committed individuals. The article focuses on targeted communication with the public – public relations. Some of the chief means of achieving this includes – advertising, actualizing expression in electronic space, and social media – for example “Facebook”. The essential features of virtual reality communication are identified, the most important of which are the consistent presentation of the unique content of the author and the personal interaction with the user by utilizing the unique feature of the Internet – interaction. The article considers this from a philosophical, sociocultural perspective. Interrogation of the concept of propaganda makes it possible to define the characteristics of the dissemination of ideas, their influence on the views of individuals as well as the public, and on the manipulation of beliefs as a mechanism for creating a new, additional identity. The study of “Vilnius City Opera’s” voice in cyberspace, argues that theatre purposefully and effectively uses multiple media for goals of bohemian troupe ideology. Through active expression on Facebook, “Vilnius City Opera” brings together a community of fans and opera art lovers, in which the younger generation is one of the most important members. [...].

Doubts About the Model and Optimal Policy

This paper analyzes optimal policy in setups where both the leader and the follower have doubts about the probability model of uncertainty. I illustrate the methodology in two environments: a) an industry populated with a large firm and many small firms in a competitive fringe, where both types of firms doubt the probability model of demand shocks, and b) a general equilibrium economy, where a policymaker taxes linearly the labor income of a representative household in order to finance an exogenous stream of stochastic spending shocks. The policymaker can distrust the probability model of spending shocks more, the same, or less than the household. Whenever there are doubts about the model, cautious agents form endogenous worst-case beliefs by assigning high probability on low profitability or low-utility events. There are two forces that shape optimal policy results: the manipulation of the endogenous beliefs of the follower to the benefit of the leader, and the discrepancy (if any) in the pessimistic beliefs between the leader and the follower. Depending on the application, the leader may amplify or mitigate the worst-case beliefs of the follower.