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Deception: notes and bibliography

Definitions: There are several accepted definitions, which differ only in minor word choices. They all have the same underlying structure.

  1. "Deception is the deliberate misrepresentation of reality done to gain a competitive advantage" Donald Daniel and Katherine Herbig "Propositions on Military Deception"

  2. "Deliberate measures to induce erroneous sensemaking and subsequent behaviour within a target audience, to achieve and exploit an advantage.” https://artifice.co.uk/

  3. "actions executed to deliberately mislead an adversary ... decision maker, thereby causing the adversary to take specific actions (or inactions) that will contribute to the accomplishment of the friendly (i.e. "deceiver's") mission." JP 3-13.4 "Military Deception" https://jfsc.ndu.edu/Portals/72/Documents/JC2IOS/Additional_Reading/1C3-JP_3-13-4_MILDEC.pdf

They all agree that a successful deception has three goals, all of which must be achieved -- this is the core requirement for a deception:

  1. condition the target's belief

  2. influence the target's consequential actions (or inactions)

  3. benefit from the target's actions (or inactions)

The deliberate misrepresentation is done using the appropriate mix of Actions (to signal) and Communications (that may be truthful or false). So, a successful lie is NOT necessarily a successful deception. It has to achieve goals 2 and 3 as well. A successful lie that does not achieve goal 3 is an expensive liability. The liar has expended effort for no return and may be caught out later. Note that many academics have the distressing and erroneous belief that "deception" is "lying" and that a successful lie is therefore a successful deception. It is not necessarily so!

There are two broad classes of deception:

A-Type: Ambiguity increasing. Confuse the target so that the target does not know what to believe. Deceiver's lies must be plausible enough and consequential enough to the target's well-being that the target cannot ignore them. The final goal is to slow the target's decision making due to increased uncertainty, and in addition force the target to spread resources thinly

M-Type: Misleading. Reduce ambiguity by building up the attractiveness in the target's mind of a single wrong alternative.

Target situation, personality, level of stress, time for target to make a decision, and other factors all feature in a successful deception plan.

SOME LITERATURE

Caveat: this is stuff I have found useful and is only a part of a vast literature.

  1. Reed Berkowitz, "A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon". September 2020.
  2. Edward Bernays, “Propaganda”, 1928
  3. Anthony Cave Brown, “Bodyguard of Lies” (two volumes), Harper & Row 1975
  4. Donald Daniel & Katherine Herbig (Eds), “Strategic Military Deception”, Pergamon Press 1981
  5. Donald Daniel & Katherine Herbig, "Propositions in Military Deception", Journal of Strategic Studies, Volume 5, 1982 - Issue 1: Military Deception and Strategic Surprise. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402398208437105
  6. David Goodstein, "On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science", Princeton University Press 2010
  7. Richard H. Shultz & Roy Godson, “Dezinformatsia”, National Strategy Information Center 1984
  8. Barton Whaley, “Practice to Deceive: Learning Curves of Military Deception Planners”, US Naval Institute Press 2016
  9. Barton Whaley, “Turnabout and Deception”, US Naval Institute Press 2016
  10. Barton Whaley, "Stratagem: Deception and Surprise in War", Center for International Studies MIT 1969, https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/81857