Cheater Detection Research Articles

The implicit cognition of reciprocal exchange: automatic retrieval of positive and negative experiences with partners in a prisoner's dilemma game

ABSTRACTModels of reciprocity imply that cheater detection is an important prerequisite for successful social exchange. Considering the fundamental role of memory in reciprocal exchange, these theories lead to the prediction that memory for cheaters should be preferentially enhanced. Here, we examine whether information of a partner's previous behaviour in an interaction is automatically retrieved when encountering the face of a partner who previously cheated or cooperated. In two studies, participants played a sequential prisoner's dilemma game with cheaters and cooperative partners. Alternating with the game blocks, participants were asked to classify the smiling or angry facial expressions of cooperators and cheaters. Both experiments revealed congruence effects, reflecting faster identification of the smiles of cooperators (Experiments 1 and 2) and faster identification of the angry facial expressions of cheaters (Experiment 2). Our study provides evidence for the automatic retrieval of the partner's behaviour in the game, regardless of whether partners cheated or cooperated, and thus provides further evidence against the cheater detection hypothesis.

Space-Efficient Verifiable Secret Sharing Using Polynomial Interpolation

Preserving data confidentiality in clouds is a key issue. Secret Sharing, a cryptographic primitive for the distribution of a secret among a group of n participants designed so that only subsets of shareholders of cardinality 0 <; t ≤ n are allowed to reconstruct the secret by pooling their shares, can help mitigating and minimizing the problem. A desirable feature of Secret Sharing schemes is cheater detection, i.e., the ability to detect one or more malicious shareholders trying to reconstruct the secret by obtaining legal shares from the other shareholders while providing them with fake shares. Verifiable Secret Sharing schemes solve this problem by allowing shareholders verifying the others' shares. We present new verification algorithms providing arbitrary secret sharing schemes with cheater detection capabilities, and prove their space efficiency with regard to other schemes appeared in the literature. We also introduce, in one of our schemes, the Exponentiating Polynomial Root Problem (EPRP), which is believed to be NP-Intermediate and therefore difficult.

Reasoning and relatedness

The purpose of this study was to test for an effect of biological relatedness on reasoning in a Wason card selection task. The behavior of children in a day care was described in a cheater detection rule, an altruism detection rule and a hazard detection rule. Two groups of parents were tested: those who were related and those who were unrelated to the child who was described in the rule. Altruism detection was performed at a lower success rate than cheater detection. As predicted on the basis of inclusive fitness theory, an interaction between problem type (cheater or non-cheater) and relatedness was obtained: an overall superior performance of related parents vanished for the cheater detection problem. Hazard detection was significantly higher for parents related to the child. Parents seem to reason less well about safety rules as they apply to unrelated children compared to rules that apply to their own.

Generalised cheater detection and identification

Cheater detection and identification are important issues in the process of secret reconstruction. To detect and identify cheaters most of the algorithms need the dealer to generate and distribute additional information to shareholders. Recently, algorithms have been proposed to detect and identify cheaters. If more than t (i.e. the threshold) shares, for example j (i.e. t < j) shares in the secret reconstruction, then redundancy of shares can be used to detect and identify cheaters. The detectability and identifiability of cheaters are proportional to the number of redundant shares. However, the number of redundant shares, j − t is fixed if original shares are used in the secret reconstruction. So, a threshold changeable verifiable secret sharing (TCVSS) has been developed, which allows shareholders working together to change the threshold t into a new threshold t′ (i.e. t′ < j) and generate new shares; whereas at the same time, maintain the original secret. The verifiability of the proposed TCVSS enables shareholders to verify that their new shares have been properly generated. The number of redundant shares can be changed to j − t′ if new shares are used in the secret reconstruction. Discussion on how to determine the new threshold t′ in order to detect and identify cheaters successfully has also been included.

Cheater-Detection from Lens of Evolutionary Psychology: Accuracy and Modularity

Social exchange plays an important role in human group living. However, cooperating individuals risk being exploited by cheaters who only benefit from but do not contribute to the cooperative work. Identifying and punishing cheaters have become a recurrent challenge in human group living so that cognitive functioning to solve this problem is modularized. Such cognitive functioning is referred to as the cheater-detection module. Ample evidence suggests that the cheater-detection module enables automatic perceptual awareness and identification of cheaters even without actual contact with or sufficient knowledge about them. People can also easily detect cheaters by analyzing social exchange scenarios. This higher cognitive reasoning also seems to be domain-specific. Another higher cognitive functioning potentially selected or evolved from cheater detection of group living is source memory. Although still being debated about its domain specificity, there is evidence showing superior source memory of violators of social contracts than that of other things. This debate about the source memory provides an important direction for future research. Other issues requiring further research include what cues people use to identify and memorize cheaters and why people punish social contract violators without apparent benefits. This article reviews these and other central issues of evolutionary cognitive and social psychology and provides directions for future research in this area.

Argumentation meets adapted cognition: Manipulation in media discourse on immigration

Critical discourse analysis has focussed extensively on argumentation in anti-immigration discourse where a specific suite of argumentation strategies has been identified as constitutive of the discourse. The successful perlocutionary effects of these arguments are analysed as products of pragmatic processes based on ‘common-sense’ reasoning schemes known as topoi. In this paper, I offer an alternative explanation grounded in cognitive-evolutionary psychology. Specifically, it is shown that a number of argumentation schemes identified as recurrent in anti-immigration discourse relate to two cognitive mechanisms proposed in evolutionary psychology: the cheater detection and avoidance mechanism (Cosmides, 1989) and epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010). It is further suggested that the potential perlocutionary effects of argument acts in anti-immigration discourse, in achieving sanction for discriminatory practices, may arise not as the product of intentional-inferential processes but as a function of cognitive heuristics and biases provided by these mechanisms. The impact of such arguments may therefore be best characterised in terms of manipulation rather than persuasion.

Cooperation creates selection for tactical deception

Conditional social behaviours such as partner choice and reciprocity are held to be key mechanisms facilitating the evolution of cooperation, particularly in humans. Although how these mechanisms select for cooperation has been explored extensively, their potential to select simultaneously for complex cheating strategies has been largely overlooked. Tactical deception, the misrepresentation of the state of the world to another individual, may allow cheaters to exploit conditional cooperation by tactically misrepresenting their past actions and/or current intentions. Here we first use a simple game-theoretic model to show that the evolution of cooperation can create selection pressures favouring the evolution of tactical deception. This effect is driven by deception weakening cheater detection in conditional cooperators, allowing tactical deceivers to elicit cooperation at lower costs, while simple cheats are recognized and discriminated against. We then provide support for our theoretical predictions using a comparative analysis of deception across primate species. Our results suggest that the evolution of conditional strategies may, in addition to promoting cooperation, select for astute cheating and associated psychological abilities. Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature.

Algebraic manipulation detection codes

Algebraic manipulation detection codes are a cryptographic primitive that was introduced by Cramer et al. (Eurocrypt 2008). It encompasses several methods that were previously used in cheater detection in secret sharing. Since its introduction, a number of additional applications have been found. This paper contains a detailed exposition of the known results about algebraic manipulation detection codes as well as some new results.

No trust on the left side: Hemifacial asymmetries for trustworthiness and emotional expressions

People can discriminate cheaters from cooperators by their appearance. However, successful cheater detection can be thwarted by a posed smile, which cheaters display with greater emotional intensity than cooperators. The present study investigated the underlying neural and cognitive mechanisms of a posed smile, which cheaters use to conceal their anti-social attitude, in terms of hemifacial asymmetries of emotional expressions. Raters (50 women and 50 men) performed trustworthiness judgments on composite faces of cheaters and cooperators, operationally defined by the number of deceptions in an economic game. The left–left composites of cheaters were judged to be more trustworthy than the right–right composites when the models posed a happy expression. This left-hemiface advantage for the happy expression was not observed for cooperators. In addition, the left-hemiface advantage of cheaters disappeared for the angry expression. These results suggest that cheaters used the left hemiface, which is connected to the emotional side of the brain (i.e., the right hemisphere), more effectively than the right hemiface to conceal their anti-social attitude.

Detecting Cheaters without Thinking: Testing the Automaticity of the Cheater Detection Module

Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that our brain is composed of evolved mechanisms. One extensively studied mechanism is the cheater detection module. This module would make people very good at detecting cheaters in a social exchange. A vast amount of research has illustrated performance facilitation on social contract selection tasks. This facilitation is attributed to the alleged automatic and isolated operation of the module (i.e., independent of general cognitive capacity). This study, using the selection task, tested the critical automaticity assumption in three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 established that performance on social contract versions did not depend on cognitive capacity or age. Experiment 3 showed that experimentally burdening cognitive resources with a secondary task had no impact on performance on the social contract version. However, in all experiments, performance on a non-social contract version did depend on available cognitive capacity. Overall, findings validate the automatic and effortless nature of social exchange reasoning.

Indelible distrust: Memory bias toward cheaters revealed as high persistence against extinction.

Our ability to learn about the reputations of others-that is, who is likely to cooperate versus cheat-contributes greatly to cooperativeness in society. There has been recent debate whether humans employ memory bias favoring cheaters (i.e., there is an evolved module for the detection of cheaters) or whether no such bias exists (i.e., reputation learning is flexibly modulated by contextual factors). We report 3 experiments that address this issue by comparing persistence against extinction-which is a reliable measure of prepared fear learning (Öhman & Mineka, 2001)-between memories regarding cheaters and cooperators. In all experiments, participants learned to classify unfamiliar persons as either cooperators or cheaters, and, then, they were instructed to disregard those learned associations and told that they had been determined arbitrarily, which simulated a verbal extinction procedure in the fear conditioning paradigm (Hugdahl & Öhman, 1977). The results indicated that while postlearning changes in perceived trustworthiness were modulated by a contextual factor (appearance of the facial stimulus), the persistence of learning exhibited a cheater advantage: Cheaters remained perceived as untrustworthy to a greater extent than cooperators as trustworthy at the extinction period. Thus, there exists a cheater bias in human reputation learning, the proximate and ultimate mechanisms of which warrant further study.

How Adaptive Is Memory for Cheaters?

Evolutionary psychology posits that the human mind comprises highly specialized cognitive modules, including a module that is thought to facilitate social cooperation by allowing for the detection of cheaters. Consistent with assumptions implied by models of reciprocal altruism, our research has revealed enhanced source memory for faces of cheaters (i.e., memory for the context in which the faces of cheaters were encountered). However, this finding should not be uncritically interpreted as evidence of a specialized cheater-detection mechanism. Here, we review evidence suggesting that human memory may be better characterized by more general mechanisms. A preference to attend to, and remember, threatening and unusual information may ensure that processing resources are focused on relevant information in a wide variety of situations, and may therefore constitute a more adaptive mechanism for remembering social information than focusing exclusively on cheating would.

On the flexibility of social source memory: A test of the emotional incongruity hypothesis.

A popular hypothesis in evolutionary psychology posits that reciprocal altruism is supported by a cognitive module that helps cooperative individuals to detect and remember cheaters. Consistent with this hypothesis, a source memory advantage for faces of cheaters (better memory for the cheating context in which these faces were encountered) was observed in previous studies. Here, we examined whether positive or negative expectancies would influence source memory for cheaters and cooperators. A cooperation task with virtual opponents was used in Experiments 1 and 2. Source memory for the emotionally incongruent information was enhanced relative to the congruent information: In Experiment 1, source memory was best for cheaters with likable faces and for cooperators with unlikable faces; in Experiment 2, source memory was better for smiling cheater faces than for smiling cooperator faces, and descriptively better for angry cooperator faces than for angry cheater faces. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the emotional incongruity effect generalizes to 3rd-party reputational information (descriptions of cheating and trustworthy behavior). The results are inconsistent with the assumption of a highly specific cheater detection module. Focusing on expectancy-incongruent information may represent a more efficient, general, and hence more adaptive memory strategy for remembering exchange-relevant information than focusing only on cheaters.

Sex, cheating, and disgust: Enhanced source memory for trait information that violates gender stereotypes

The present study examines memory for social-exchange-relevant information. In Experiment 1 male and female faces were shown together with behaviour descriptions of cheating, altruistic, and neutral behaviour. Previous results have led to the hypothesis that people preferentially remember schema-atypical information. Given the common gender stereotype that women are kinder and less egoistic than men, this atypicality account would predict that source memory (that is, memory for the type of context to which a face was associated) should be enhanced for female cheaters in comparison to male cheaters. The results of Experiment 1 confirmed this hypothesis. Experiment 2 reveals that source memory for female faces associated with disgusting behaviours is enhanced in comparison to male faces associated with disgusting behaviours. Thus the atypicality effect generalises beyond social-exchange-relevant information, a result which is inconsistent with the assumption that the findings can be ascribed to a highly specific cheater detection module.

A Fake Smile Thwarts Cheater Detection

People can discriminate cheaters from cooperators on the basis of negative facial expressions. However, such cheater detection is far from perfect in real-world situations. Therefore, it is possible that cheaters have the ability to disguise negative emotional expressions that signal their uncooperative attitude. To test this possibility, emotional intensity and trustworthiness were evaluated for facial photographs of cheaters and cooperators defined by scores in an economic game. The facial photographs had either posed happy or angry expressions. The angry expressions of cheaters were rated angrier and less trustworthy than those of cooperators. On the other hand, happy expressions of cheaters were higher in emotional intensity but comparable to those of cooperators in trustworthiness. These results suggest that cheater detection based on the processing of negative facial expressions can be thwarted by a posed or fake smile, which cheaters put on with higher intensity than cooperators.

Asking sensitive questions: A statistical power analysis of randomized response models.

This article derives the power curves for a Wald test that can be applied to randomized response models when small prevalence rates must be assessed (e.g., detecting doping behavior among elite athletes). These curves enable the assessment of the statistical power that is associated with each model (e.g., Warner's model, crosswise model, unrelated question model, forced-choice models, item count model, cheater detection model). This power analysis can help in choosing the optimal model and sample size and in setting model parameters in survey studies. The general framework can be applied to all existing randomized response model versions. The Appendix of this article contains worked-out numerical examples to demonstrate the power analysis for each specific model.

Cognitive Capacities, Mental Modules, and Neural Regions

Cognitive Capacities, Mental Modules, and Neural Regions Keith Frankish (bio) Keywords neuroimaging, modularity, personal/subper-sonal distinction, dual-system theory, psychopathology Dan lloyd (2011) issues a salutary warning against the assumption of what I shall call neural modularity—the view that there is a one-to-one mapping between cognitive functions and distinct brain regions. He shows how the assumption can distort the interpretation of neuroimaging studies and blind researchers to global structures and activity patterns that may be crucial to many aspects of cognitive function and dysfunction. In this note, I want to add a further dimension to the discussion by making connections with the notion of mental modularity developed by evolutionary psychologists. What is the relation between mental and neural modularity? Do the arguments for massive mental modularity also support neural modularity? I offer some preliminary remarks on these questions and their bearing on issues in psychopathology. Modern discussion of mental modularity takes its start from Fodor's The Modularity of Mind (1983). Fodor's conception of a mental module is a strict one, appropriate for peripheral systems, such as vision and language. Modules in his sense are special-purpose computational mechanisms that are to a large extent innate and hardwired, deliver shallow (nonconceptual) outputs, and operate in a way that is typically mandatory, fast, inaccessible, and informationally encapsulated. More recent writers adopt a more relaxed notion of mental modularity, which is applicable to central cognitive processes (e.g., Barrett and Kurzban 2006; Carruthers 2006; Coltheart 1999). Modules in this sense are functionally specialized mechanisms that are dedicated to particular cognitive tasks, such as theory of mind, biological classification, and cheater detection, and that can deliver conceptualized beliefs and desires as outputs. Their key property is domain specificity, and it is an empirical question to what extent a given module possesses the other features on Fodor's list. It is arguable that evolution would have favored the development of such central modules as well as peripheral Fodorian ones. Complex evolved systems are typically composed of specialized subsystems, and it is likely that specialized, domain-specific cognitive mechanisms would be more efficient than general-purpose ones, especially given the wide range of adaptive problems faced by humans and other animals. Building on such arguments, some theorists maintain that the mind is composed wholly, or mostly, of modular subsystems—a view known as the "massive modularity hypothesis" (e.g., Carruthers 2006; Cosmides and Tooby 1992; Pinker 1997; Sperber 1994). [End Page 279] My aim here is not to defend massive modularity, but simply to ask whether mental modularity involves a commitment to neural modularity as well, and thus whether the arguments for the former carry over to the latter. It will be helpful to think in terms of three descriptive enterprises: personal psychology, subpersonal psychology, and neurology (compare Dennett 1981). Personal psychology is an idealized competence theory; it ascribes psychological traits to organisms on the basis of their behavior. Talk of cognitive capacities is pitched at this level. Subpersonal psychology posits internal information-processing mechanisms that support personal-level psychological traits. The massive modularity hypothesis belongs to this level. Neurology, of course, deals with the fine-grained biological structures and processes in which the other levels are realized. Now, neural modularity is a claim about the relation between personal psychology and neurology; it is the claim that each cognitive capacity is realized in a localized brain region. And the question of whether massive mental modularity entails neural modularity breaks down into two subquestions—one concerning the relation between personal and subpersonal psychology, and the other the relation between subpersonal psychology and neurology. The first question is whether each cognitive capacity is subserved by a single proprietary module; the second whether each module is realized in a distinct brain region. If the answers to both questions are positive, then mental modularity is equivalent to neural modularity. I take that, for a given organism, the answers might be positive, but I shall argue that there is no reason to think that they must be, or even that it is particularly likely that they are—and thus that mental modularity does not entail neural modularity. Consider first the relation between mental modules and...

Cheater detection mechanism and tolerance for capriciousness

Cheater detection mechanism and tolerance for capriciousness

Evidence for automatic cheater detection as indexed by event related brain potentials

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Evolutionary Theory: The Missing Link for Conceptualizing Public Relations

This article introduces the concept of using Charles Darwin's (1859/1979) evolutionary theory as the metatheory for conceptualizing public relations thought. It examines the state of public relations theory development and explores theories that have been proposed as metatheories for the field, including systems theory, complexity theory, and symmetrical/Excellence theory. It also explores the tenets of evolutionary theory that have relevance for public relations theory, including social intelligence, Machiavellian intelligence, cheater detection, cooperation, reciprocity, and reciprocal altruism. It then makes the case for the role that evolutionary theory could play as a metatheory in the further development of public relations theory.