Deceptive Strategies Research Articles

A Pragma-Stylistic Study of Misdirection in Selected Detective Novels

The analysis of detective novels has taken different aspects. The linguistic analysis of them, for example, has tackled the linguistic systems of morphology, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In line with the linguistic analysis, this study explores the various pragmatic and stylistic devices realized through detective novels for the purpose of misdirecting and deceiving the reader. The problem is that when readers try to reach to the truth, they face difficulties. They might not reach to the right solution or infer wrong conclusions because writers use some techniques to hide the truth and mislead them. This study aims at examining these techniques and devices; namely, Grice's Maxims and ambiguity as pragmatic devices on the one hand, and foregrounding, backgrounding, and focalization as stylistic devices on the other hand. It also aims to show the effect of these devices in a number of selected detective novels written by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. It is hypothesized that different stylistic strategies are used in detective novels for the purpose of misdirection and that foregrounding is the most frequently used one among these devices. It is also hypothesized that the rate of using pragmatic deception strategies is higher in Christie’s novels than in Doyle's ones, especially the violations of Grice's maxims, and that the two maxims of Quantity and Manner are more frequently violated than the other two maxims of Quality and Relevance. The findings of the study reveal that Christies’ style of writing is more mysterious than that of Doyle. The study also reveals that focalization, the violation of the two maxims of Quantity and Quality, and the utilization of ambiguous expressions which are also considered instances of violating the maxim of Manner are the most recurrent stylistic and pragmatic deception strategies respectively.

Dynamic Hypergames for Synthesis of Deceptive Strategies With Temporal Logic Objectives

In this paper, we study the use of deception for strategic planning in adversarial environments. We model the interaction between the agent (player 1) and the adversary (player 2) as a two-player concurrent stochastic game in which the adversary has incomplete information about the agent’s task specification given as a temporal logic formula. During the interaction, the adversary can infer the agent’s intention from observations and adapt its strategy so as to prevent the agent from satisfying the objective. To plan against such an adaptive opponent, the agent must leverage its knowledge about the adversary’s incomplete information to influence the behavior of the opponent, and thereby be deceptive. To synthesize a deceptive strategy, we introduce a class of hypergame models that capture the interaction between the agent and its adversary given asymmetric, incomplete information. We develop a solution concept for this class of hypergames and show that the subjectively rationalizable strategy for the agent is deceptive and maximizes the probability of satisfying the task in temporal logic. Such a deceptive strategy is obtained by modeling the opponent’s evolving perception of the agent’s objective and integrating it into planning. This allows the agent to manipulate the opponent’s perception so as to induce the opponent into taking actions that benefit the agent. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our deceptive planning algorithm using robot motion planning examples with temporal logic objectives and design a detection mechanism to notify the agent of potential errors in modeling the adversary’s behavior. Note to Practitioners—Many security and defense applications employ deception mechanisms for strategic advantages. This work presents a game-theoretic framework for planning deceptive strategies in stochastic environments and shows that the opponent modeling plays a key role in the design of effective deception mechanisms. For applications to cyber-physical security, the practitioners can employ temporal logic for specifying security properties in the system and analyze defense with deception using the proposed methods.

About “Ivans of Oblivious Origin”: One of the Strategies of Social Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Russia

In the Russian legal system, the phenomenon of persons of oblivious origin emerged in the early eighteenth century. During population censuses, enumerators discovered a number of people, unaware of their parents and places of domicile, who subsequently did not belong to any social stratum. Despite its realization that many persons of oblivious origin were in fact runaway peasants and deserters, the government decided to use them to increase its population in different parts of the country instead of returning them to their official localities. At the same time, some runaways independently managed to be added to the census rolls in towns and villages, thereby changing their social status. As a result, the examination of the issue of people of oblivious origin as one of the strategies of deception improves our understanding of adaptation tools and everyday practices, employed by the inhabitants of the Russian Empire.

Violations of CSR Practices in the Australian Financial Industry: How Is the Decision-Making Power of Australian Women Implicated?

Financial institutions have made significant efforts in recent decades to integrate CSR activities into their core business approaches; however, several studies have shown that CSR violations have increased in the Australian financial industry, with financial institutions engaging in unethical practices and deceptive strategies to benefit their organizational profits over consumer interests. So far, research has shed light on how financial institutions have used CSR violation and manipulative strategies to bias consumer decision making, but there has been little investigation into how these manipulative techniques bias an individual’s rational, emotional, and decision-making powers when purchasing financial products. As a result, this study employs the theoretical notions of the emotion-imbued choice model (EIC) to investigate on how rational decision making, along with moderating effects of emotions (such as anxiety) and behavioural traits (such self-efficacy), influence the decision-making powers of Australian women when making financial product purchase decisions. It employs an online survey with 357 usable responses from Australian women, where several complex products and services are offered, and contentious claims of financial misconducts are reported. Data analysis is carried out through SPSS where regression analysis is performed along with double moderation performed through Hayes Process Model 2, with anxiety and self-efficacy chosen as moderators. Results reveal that anxiety significantly affects decision-making power of Australian women whereas moderating effects of self-efficacy was found to be insignificant. In addition, the regression results also showed that in the face of CSR violations, rational decision making has the greater influence on decision-making power of Australian women as compared to anxiety and self-efficacy. This study will be useful to a wide range of stakeholders, including the government, regulators, marketers, CSR activists, consumer watchdogs as they provide a comprehensive understanding of the interactions between rationality, emotions, and behavioural traits and how they affect the decision making of Australian women when making financial product purchase decisions.

Interviewing to detect omission lies

AbstractInterviewees sometimes deliberately omit reporting some information. Such omission lies differ from other lies because all the information interviewees present may be entirely truthful. Truth tellers and lie tellers carried out a mission. Truth tellers reported the entire mission truthfully. Lie tellers were also entirely truthful but left out one element of the mission. In truth tellers' statements, only the parts that lie tellers were also asked to recall were analysed. Interviews were carried out via the Cognitive Credibility Assessment, Reality Interview, or standard interview protocol. Dependent variables were the details, complications and verifiable sources interviewees reported. A questionnaire measured three deception strategies: ‘Tell it all’, ‘keep it simple’ or ‘paying attention to demeanour’. Lie tellers reported fewer details, complications and verifiable sources than truth tellers and reporting these variables was negatively correlated with the ‘keep it simple’ and ‘demeanour’ strategies. The type of interview protocol did not affect the results.

Poisoning the Well: How Astroturfing Harms Trust in Advocacy Organizations

Sociological research on social movements and politics holds that advocacy organizations are typically trusted to be authentic agents of their constituents. At the same time, however, businesses and other outside interests often engage in covert “astroturfing” strategies in which they ventriloquize claims through apparently independent grassroots associations (but which are entirely funded and staffed to benefit the sponsor). These widespread and deceptive strategies may harm trust in advocacy groups overall, extending beyond those revealed to be involved, through a mechanism of categorical stigmatization. This study is the first to test how revealed covert patronage may “poison the well” for all advocacy groups, with implications for how social movements and other advocacy causes suffer harm from illegitimate political practices by other organizations. The authors carried out two survey-experiments in which a local advocacy organization was revealed to be operating, respectively, as a “front” for either a corporation or think tank; in each experiment, conditions varied depending upon whether the sponsor was presented as highly reputable, low reputation, or with no specified reputation. In both experiments, astroturfing led to significant declines in trust in advocacy groups overall. We highlight implications for theory and research on social movements, organizational theory, and political processes.

‘STEALING’ VICTORY AT GAUGAMELA: THE MANIPULATION OF TIME IN ARRIAN'S NARRATIVE

There are numerous historical reconstructions of the lead-up to the Battle of Gaugamela, albeit often as a short prelude to the battle itself. The focus tends to be historical reality, with the extant sources blended to produce a probable sequence of events. Such narratives have their place, but the process masks the details provided by specific sources. This article analyses Arrian's representation of events to understand his narrative better. Particular attention is paid to his chronological ‘mistake’, specifically the loss of a day which is usually just corrected by commentators. I suggest that this was not an error at all, but a deliberate construct. I show that Arrian manipulates ‘narrative time’ by using the night in order to blur historical time, and how this creates a framework within which Arrian carefully constructs his Alexander–Parmenio exchanges. The construct of the adviser, the use of night imagery, and the select use of terminology (kleptein) are utilized by Arrian in order to maintain his heroic image of Alexander and to conceal any strategies of deception.

Effect of Disinformation Propagation on Opinion Dynamics: A Game Theoretic Approach

Disinformation can alter or manipulate our values, opinions, and rational decisions toward any life event because disinformation, such as fake news or rumors, is propagated rapidly and broadly in online social networks (OSNs). Game-theoretic models can help people maximize the benefits from dynamic social interactions. This work presents an opinion framework formulated by repeated, incomplete information games that model OSN users’ subjective opinions. The users may update their opinions using various criteria, such as uncertainty, homophily, encounter, herding, or assertion. We demonstrate how Subjective Logic, a belief model explicitly handling opinion uncertainty, can be employed to model attackers’ deception strategies, users’ opinion update models, and the influences of propagating disinformation through the interactions between users. Through extensive experiments, we investigated how an individual user's information processing type can introduce different impacts on the extent of disinformation propagation. We compared the performance of the five different opinion update models under OSNs characterized by two real OSN datasets. We analyzed their impact on the choices of best strategies, their utilities, and network/opinion polarization. We also examined how the player's choices of best strategies under uncertainty are different from Nash Equilibrium strategies based on correct beliefs towards their opponents’ moves.

Defeating Super-Reactive Jammers With Deception Strategy: Modeling, Signal Detection, and Performance Analysis

This paper develops a novel framework to defeat a super-reactive jammer, one of the most difficult jamming attacks to deal with in practice. Specifically, the jammer has an unlimited power budget and is equipped with the self-interference suppression capability to simultaneously attack and listen to the transmitter’s activities. Consequently, dealing with super-reactive jammers is very challenging. Thus, we introduce a smart deception mechanism to attract the jammer to continuously attack the channel and then leverage jamming signals to transmit data based on the ambient backscatter communication technology. To detect the backscattered signals, the maximum likelihood detector can be adopted. However, this method is notorious for its high computational complexity and requires the model of the current propagation environment as well as channel state information. Hence, we propose a deep learning-based detector that can dynamically adapt to any channels and noise distributions. With a Long Short-Term Memory network, our detector can learn the received signals’ dependencies to achieve a performance close to that of the optimal maximum likelihood detector. Through simulation and theoretical results, we demonstrate that with our approaches, the more power the jammer uses to attack the channel, the better bit error rate performance the transmitter can achieve.

Give and take: A microgenetic study of preschoolers' deceptive and prosocial behavior in relation to their socio-cognitive development

Early on, young children begin to learn the social skills which will help them navigate through an increasingly complex social world. We explored how deceiving for personal gain potentially interacts with sharing the resulting resources and how they both relate to theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 92, 43 girls). Children played a hide-and-seek zero-sum game in which they could win stickers if they discovered how to deceive the experimenter. Then they were prompted to share their stickers in a dictator game paradigm. Using a microgenetic design, we tracked deceptive behavior across ten sessions and sharing behavior across five of these sessions, plus a follow-up session 15 months later. Children polarized into a group who never deceived across all sessions, and a group who constantly deceived above chance levels (around 85 % of the time). Sharing behavior was extremely low (under 6 % of stickers) across the sessions. At follow-up, deceptive behavior was above 80 %, while sharing remained at a low level (under 5 %). The novelty of our findings was that children who initially discovered how to deceive shared less than the children who didn't use this deceptive strategy. Nonetheless, this pattern was reversed at follow-up. Furthermore, ToM positively predicted deceptive behavior across all sessions and improved after the microgenetic sessions but wasn't related with deception at follow-up. Implications for enabling children to deploy the growing understanding of their worlds in a more prosocial way are discussed.

Ten competencies for the science misinformation crisis

AbstractScientific misinformation and disinformation, proliferating via the internet and social media, are now significant problems. Proposed solutions vary substantially. Here, I describe a set of prospective benchmarks—10 competencies—that seem essential for reorienting science education to address the challenge. They include, first, elements of epistemic motivation, including basic epistemological beliefs about “constructed” knowledge, adopting a posture of respect for empirical evidence, and an understanding of our epistemic dependence on experts. Second, the benchmarks include perspectives and skills in interacting with media sources. These include how to identify experts, how to identify credible gatekeepers, how to recognize deceptive strategies, and how to deal with social networks and technology. Finally, the competencies include self‐regulation, such as acknowledging the cognitive dispositions that bias our thinking (especially about information that challenges our pre‐existing beliefs) and the counter‐balancing role of consensus. I hope that these competency goals can function as a concrete target in guiding discussion of perhaps more complete or more nuanced approaches to the current crisis. With such competencies clearly and explicitly articulated, teachers will be better positioned to develop effective classroom strategies to nurture the relevant competencies.

Deceptive Decision-Making under Uncertainty

We study the design of autonomous agents that are capable of deceiving outside observers about their intentions while carrying out tasks in stochastic, complex environments. By modeling the agent's behavior as a Markov decision process, we consider a setting where the agent aims to reach one of multiple potential goals while deceiving outside observers about its true goal. We propose a novel approach to model observer predictions based on the principle of maximum entropy and to efficiently generate deceptive strategies via linear programming. The proposed approach enables the agent to exhibit a variety of tunable deceptive behaviors while ensuring the satisfaction of probabilistic constraints on the behavior. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach via comparative user studies and present a case study on the streets of Manhattan, New York, using real travel time distributions.

Deception Strategies in the Discourse of American Think Tanks: An Argumentative- Pragmatic Analysis

Deception is a misrepresentation of reality that attracted many researchers examining it from various perspectives. However, no due attention has been given to the discursive deception strategies in the work of think tanks. This study aims at exposing the deception strategies deployed in the conservative American think tanks’ discourse which concern itself with the (re)production of socio-political realities. The study holds the significance of the detection and explication of argumentative and pragmatic discursive deception strategies which impose ideological hegemony and socio-political polarization of the positively presented Self against the negatively presented Other. This study attempts to answer a twofold question: what are the discursive deception strategies involved in the work of think tanks, and why/how these strategies are applied? To this end, eight political texts from three think tanks were analyzed adopting an eclectic model based on van Dijk (2000) and Yule (1996). The analyzed data mainly focuses on four political themes namely (1) terrorism in Islam, (2) Russian role in the Middle East, (3) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, (4) the U.S. policy in the Middle East. The results demonstrate the pervasiveness of discursive deception strategies in the think tanks’ discourse which endeavor to communicate an ideological polarization of a positive presentation of the Self against a negative presentation of the Other and reinforce a hegemony of particular socio-political realities. Findings can be beneficial for students of (critical) discourse analysis, media, communications studies, and English for special purposes

A Novel IDS Securing Industrial Control System of Critical Infrastructure Using Deception Technology

The Industrial Control System (ICS) has become the key concept in the modern industrial world, enabling process monitoring and system control for general industrial systems and critical infrastructures. High-skilled hackers can invade an imperfect ICS by existing vulnerabilities without much effort. Conventional defenses (such as encryption and firewall) to keep invaders away are getting less and less effective when an attack is carried out by exploiting an array of particular vulnerabilities. Under this circumstance, a new-type intrusion detection system (IDS) based on deception strategy using honeypot technique is proposed, which is of dramatic effectiveness in protecting ICSs of critical infrastructures. In this honeypot-based model, we capture malicious Internet flows and system operations. We analyze the collected data before alerting and preventing the intrusion alike when it affects the system in the future. This paper deals with the model's concept, architecture, deployment, and what else can be achieved in the field of Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (CIC).

Foureye: Defensive Deception Against Advanced Persistent Threats via Hypergame Theory

Defensive deception techniques have emerged as a promising proactive defense mechanism to mislead an attacker and thereby achieve attack failure. However, most game-theoretic defensive deception approaches have assumed that players maintain consistent views under uncertainty. They do not consider players’ possible, subjective beliefs formed due to asymmetric information given to them. In this work, we formulate a hypergame between an attacker and a defender where they can interpret the same game differently and accordingly choose their best strategy based on their respective beliefs. This gives a chance for defensive deception strategies to manipulate an attacker’s belief, which is the key to the attacker’s decision-making. We consider advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks, which perform multiple attacks in the stages of the cyber kill chain (CKC) where both the attacker and the defender aim to select optimal strategies based on their beliefs. Through extensive simulation experiments, we demonstrated how effectively the defender can leverage defensive deception techniques while dealing with multi-staged APT attacks in a hypergame in which the imperfect information is reflected based on perceived uncertainty, cost, and expected utilities of both the attacker and defender, the system lifetime (i.e., mean time to security failure), and improved false-positive rates of intrusion detection.

Colorado potato beetle exploits frass-associated bacteria to suppress defense responses in potato plants.

Colorado potato beetle (CPB; Leptinotarsa decemlineata) is a destructive quarantine pest that develops broad physiological adaptations to potato plants. During feeding, CPB deposits a copious amount of wet frass onto the surface of leaves and stems that remains in place for long periods. Insect behaviors such as feeding, crawling and oviposition are able to mediate plant defenses. However, the specific role of CPB defecation-associated cues in manipulating plant defenses remains unclear. CPB larval frass significantly suppressed potato polyphenol oxidase activity and enhanced larval growth on treated potato plants. The incorporation of antibiotics into larval frass triggered higher jasmonic acid (JA)-regulated defense responses in potato plants compared with antibiotic-free frass. Four bacterial symbionts belonging to the genera Acinetobacter, Citrobacter, Enterobacter and Pantoea were isolated from larval frass and suppressed plant defenses. After reinoculation of these bacteria into axenic larvae, Acinetobacter and Citrobacter were found to be highly abundant in the frass, whereas Enterobacter and Pantoea were less abundant probably due to the negative effect of potato steroidal glycoalkaloids (SGA) such as α-solanine. Furthermore, direct application of Acinetobacter and Citrobacter to wounded potato plants significantly inhibited the expression of genes associated with the JA-mediated defense signaling pathway and SGA biosynthesis. Our findings demonstrate that CPB exploits frass-associated bacteria as a deceptive strategy of plant defense suppression, adding an interesting dimension to our understanding of how CPB successfully specializes on potato plants. © 2022 Society of Chemical Industry.

Ignoring Qualifications as a Pragmatic Fallacy: Enrichments and Their Use for Manipulating Commitments

The fallacy of ignoring qualifications, or secundum quid et simpliciter, is a deceptive strategy that is pervasive in argumentative dialogues, discourses, and discussions. It consists in misrepresenting an utterance so that its meaning is broadened, narrowed, or simply modified to pursue different goals, such as drawing a specific conclusion, attacking the interlocutor, or generating humorous reactions. The “secundum quid” was described by Aristotle as an interpretative manipulative strategy, based on the contrast between the “proper” sense of a statement and its meaning taken absolutely or in a certain respect. However, how can an “unqualified” statement have a proper meaning different from the qualified one, and vice versa? This “linguistic” fallacy brings to light a complex relationship between pragmatics, argumentation, and interpretation. The secundum quid is described in this paper as a manipulative argument, whose deceptive effect lies in its pragmatic dimension. This fallacy is analyzed as a strategy of decontextualization lying at the interface between pragmatics and argumentation and consisting of the unwarranted passage from an utterance to its semantic representation. By ignoring the available evidence and the presumptive interpretation of a statement, the speaker places it in a different context or suppresses textual and contextual evidence to infer a specific meaning different from the presumable one.

Publicwashing in Education: Definition, Motives, and Manifestations

This essay coins and conceptualizes the term “publicwashing.” In educational systems and organizations, publicwashing is a symbolic communication that emphasizes organizational publicness for the purpose of a superficial repair of reputation. The essay defines publicwashing and describes its motives and manifestations. Additionally, it illustrates publicwashing by discussing the concept in the context of the U.S. charter school reform. Adopting the lens of symbolic communication in the charter school case illustrates how the discrepancy between the “public” label and private characteristics of charter schools is managed through public relations. Future studies of publicwashing in education can further apply the symbolic communication approach to various cases, contexts, and deceptive strategies.

Ideological Polarization as a Deception Strategy in the Discourse of American Think Tanks: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Deception is an inseparable facet of political discourse in attaining strategic political gains though compromising public opinion. However, the employment of discursive deception strategies by the policy-making institutions of think tanks has not received due attention in the literature. The current study aims at exploring how the ideologizing deception strategies are utilized by the conservative American think tank of the Washington Institute to reproduce socio-political realities and re-shape public opinion. To fulfill this task, van Dijk’s (2000) notion of ideological polarization which shows positive self-representation and negative other representation is adopted to conduct a critical discourse analysis of four Arabic texts released with the main focus on four different political topics. Results reveal the centrality of employing deception strategies for the sake of realizing political wins for establishing an ideological hegemony while simultaneously polarizing an Us against Them extreme.

Ideological Polarization as a Deception Strategy in the Discourse of American Think Tanks: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Deception is an inseparable facet of political discourse in attaining strategic political gains though compromising public opinion. However, the employment of discursive deception strategies by the policy-making institutions of think tanks has not received due attention in the literature. The current study aims at exploring how the ideologizing deception strategies are utilized by the conservative American think tank of the Washington Institute to reproduce socio-political realities and re-shape public opinion. To fulfill this task, van Dijk’s (2000) notion of ideological polarization which shows positive self-representation and negative other representation is adopted to conduct a critical discourse analysis of four Arabic texts released with the main focus on four different political topics. Results reveal the centrality of employing deception strategies for the sake of realizing political wins for establishing an ideological hegemony while simultaneously polarizing an Us against Them extreme.