Situational and dispositional determinants of intentional deceiving

Does opportunity make the thief or are people dispositionally prone to deceive? The interaction between personality and the circumstances surrounding deception is crucial to understand what promotes dishonesty in our society. Due to its inherent spontaneity and sociality, deceptive behaviour may be hardly reproducible in experimental settings. We developed a novel paradigm in the form of an interactive game where participants can choose whether to lie to another person in situations of loss vs. gain, and of no-reputation-risk vs. reputation-risk linked to the disclosure of their deceptive behaviour to others. Thus, our ecological paradigm allowed subjects to spontaneously decide when to lie and face the challenge of deceiving others. In the case of loss, participants lied to reverse the outcome in their favour. Deception was lower in the reputation-risk condition where personality traits concerning social interactions also played an important role.The results suggest that deception is definitely promoted by unfavourable events, and that maintaining one''s own reputation encourages honesty, particularly in socially inclined individuals.     

Altruism towards strangers in need: costly signaling in an industrial society

In the present study, the costly signaling theory (CST) is used to examine the effect of an offer of charity on social recognition. On behalf of a charitable organization, 186 students enrolled in 16 different courses were asked to offer support to unfamiliar persons in need. In accordance with our predictions, the results show that significantly more subjects are willing to give assistance if they make charity offers in the presence of their group members than when the offers are made in secret. In accordance with CST—but not with the prevailing explanations in social psychology—the likelihood of charity service was strongly influenced by the expected cost of altruistic behavior. Publicly demonstrated altruistic intentions yielded long-term benefits: Subjects who were willing to participate in a particular charity activity gained significantly higher sociometry scores (as a sign of social recognition) than did others. The cost of volunteerism correlated with social recognition in the case of a charity act judged as the most expensive (giving assistance to mentally retarded children), but not for the other categories of charity offer. Our results suggest that public generosity towards strangers as a costly signal may convey reliable information about subjects' personality traits, such as cooperativeness, but our data do not support the hypothesis that the signaling mechanism is related to sexual selection and mate choice.     

Pollinator behavior and deceptive pollination: learning process and floral evolution

Some species of flowering plants engage in nonmodel deceptive pollination, attracting pollinators by large nonmimetic floral displays and providing no reward. Pollinators can learn to avoid deceptive plants and to favor nectariferous species. The reproductive success of these species is expected to be density dependent for two opposite reasons: the commoner cheating flowers are, the easier they are to avoid and the lower the quality of the patch, making it more difficult to recognize that unrewarding flowers are not profitable. When a deceptive species is made up of multiple floral variants, pollinators' learning could decrease the reproductive success of any particularly common floral variant. Within a population of deceptive plants, mean reproductive success could, therefore, vary with the number of floral variants. We investigate these three hypotheses by modeling the behavior of pollinators foraging in communities of deceptive and rewarding flowers. Simulations revealed that the reproductive success of deceptive flowers varies in a density-dependent manner and that floral variants can be submitted to negative frequency-dependent selection. We compare density dependence in nonmodel deceptive species to what is expected in Batesian mimics and discuss possible selection of morphological variants. Finally, we survey how pollinators' learning capacities can make mean reproductive success depend on morphological variability within a population.     

Five-Year Olds,but Not Chimpanzees,Attempt to Manage Their Reputations

Virtually all theories of the evolution of cooperation require that cooperators find ways to interact with one another selectively, to the exclusion of cheaters. This means that individuals must make reputational judgments about others as cooperators, based on either direct or indirect evidence. Humans, and possibly other species, add another component to the process: they know that they are being judged by others, and so they adjust their behavior in order to affect those judgments – so-called impression management. Here, we show for the first time that already preschool children engage in such behavior. In an experimental study, 5-year-old human children share more and steal less when they are being watched by a peer than when they are alone. In contrast, chimpanzees behave the same whether they are being watched by a groupmate or not. This species difference suggests that humans'' concern for their own self-reputation, and their tendency to manage the impression they are making on others, may be unique to humans among primates.     

Good Liars Are Neither ‘Dark’ Nor Self-Deceptive

Deception is a central component of the personality ''Dark Triad'' (Machiavellianism, Psychopathy and Narcissism). However, whether individuals exhibiting high scores on Dark Triad measures have a heightened deceptive ability has received little experimental attention. The present study tested whether the ability to lie effectively, and to detect lies told by others, was related to Dark Triad, Lie Acceptability, or Self-Deceptive measures of personality using an interactive group-based deception task. At a group level, lie detection accuracy was correlated with the ability to deceive others—replicating previous work. No evidence was found to suggest that Dark Triad traits confer any advantage either to deceive others, or to detect deception in others. Participants who considered lying to be more acceptable were more skilled at lying, while self-deceptive individuals were generally less credible and less confident when lying. Results are interpreted within a framework in which repeated practice results in enhanced deceptive ability.     

On the Applicability of Brain Reading for Predictive Human-Machine Interfaces in Robotics

The ability of today''s robots to autonomously support humans in their daily activities is still limited. To improve this, predictive human-machine interfaces (HMIs) can be applied to better support future interaction between human and machine. To infer upcoming context-based behavior relevant brain states of the human have to be detected. This is achieved by brain reading (BR), a passive approach for single trial EEG analysis that makes use of supervised machine learning (ML) methods. In this work we propose that BR is able to detect concrete states of the interacting human. To support this, we show that BR detects patterns in the electroencephalogram (EEG) that can be related to event-related activity in the EEG like the P300, which are indicators of concrete states or brain processes like target recognition processes. Further, we improve the robustness and applicability of BR in application-oriented scenarios by identifying and combining most relevant training data for single trial classification and by applying classifier transfer. We show that training and testing, i.e., application of the classifier, can be carried out on different classes, if the samples of both classes miss a relevant pattern. Classifier transfer is important for the usage of BR in application scenarios, where only small amounts of training examples are available. Finally, we demonstrate a dual BR application in an experimental setup that requires similar behavior as performed during the teleoperation of a robotic arm. Here, target recognition processes and movement preparation processes are detected simultaneously. In summary, our findings contribute to the development of robust and stable predictive HMIs that enable the simultaneous support of different interaction behaviors.     

Cerebral mechanisms of error detection during deceptive responses in the normal state and under the influence of alcohol

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were studied during deceptive and truthful responses of subjects that were in the normal state or under the influence of alcohol. The psychological task was designed in such a way that the subjects themselves decided whether or not they would tell a lie. Thirteen healthy volunteers participated in the study. An actual deceptive answer was characterized by a higher amplitude of the frontocentral ERP N190 component compared to the ERP accompanying a truthful answer. Alcohol consumption inverted the ratio between the amplitudes of this component in the cases of deceptive and truthful answers (with a higher amplitude in the latter case). The obtained result suggests that a deceptive action activates the so-called cerebral error detector. Under the influence of alcohol, the cerebral error detection system functioned abnormally, so that a deceptive action was not perceived as erroneous. This disturbance of automatic control may account for the lower amplitude of the late positive component of ERPs, which, in our opinion, reflects the process of making a decision on a deceptive response. This may explain why, e.g., alcohol consumption by a driver is hazardous: the activity is mainly controlled by conscious processes (the probability of making “the only right decision” in a critical situation is decreased, reactions become slow, etc.). Thus, the experimental model where the subject consumes a small amount of alcohol may be used for studying the altered functional mode of the cerebral error detector. Such studies seem promising in terms of searching for and developing methods for noninvasive modification of the error detector activity that could be used, e.g., in treatment for obsessions.     

Biting cleaner fish use altruism to deceive image-scoring client reef fish

Humans are more likely to help those who they have observed helping others previously. Individuals may thus benefit from being altruistic without direct reciprocity of recipients but due to gains in 'image' and associated indirect reciprocity. I suggest, however, that image-scoring individuals may be exploitable by cheaters if pay-offs vary between interactions. I illustrate this point with data on cleaner-client reef fish interactions. I show the following: (i) there is strong variation between cleaners with respect to cheating of clients (i.e. feeding on client tissue instead of parasites); (ii) clients approach cleaners, that they observe cooperating with their current client and avoid cleaners that they observe cheating; (iii) cleaners that cheat frequently are avoided more frequently than more cooperative cleaners (iv) cleaners that cheat frequently behave altruistically towards their smallest client species; (v) altruistic acts are followed by exploitative interactions. Thus, it appears that cleaners indeed have an image score, which selects for cooperative cleaners. However, cheating cleaners use altruism in potentially low-pay-off interactions to deceive and attract image-scoring clients that will be exploited.     

Biased face recognition in the Faith Game

Several studies have indicated that people are able to memorize the face of a cheater more accurately than that of a noncheater, but some contradictory findings have also been reported. Because most previous studies focused on memory for the faces of cheaters who break social contracts, the consequence for the subjects of their cheating was unclear. In our study, participants were asked to decide whether they trusted persons depicted in photographs to give them money using two sessions of the Faith Game. The participants tended to not increase their trust in the individuals, depicted in photographs, who had altruistically given money to them previously. However, participants recognized nonaltruists who had not shared money and, during the second session, rescinded the trust that they had previously placed in them. This suggests that bias in face recognition is not restricted to the recognition level, as previous studies have suggested, but also operates at the behavioral level and functions to facilitate the avoidance of persons who have caused some disadvantage in a previous interaction, rather than to facilitate new relationships with altruists by enhancing recognition of their faces.     

Context-dependent behavior and the benefits of communal nesting

We present a model for the behavior of communally nesting insects. Females may forage for food to provision offspring or may remain in the nest, with the option of eating and replacing nest mates' eggs. Orphaned brood are at risk of predation. The optimal behavior of solitary females is determined using stochastic dynamic programming; static and dynamic evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs) are then calculated for colonies of various sizes. A solitary female should forage if her brood is smaller than a time-dependent threshold. Females in small colonies should forage. In colonies above some threshold size, the static ESS is for one female to forage and the rest to cheat. The dynamic ESS in large colonies is for no females to forage until some time close to the end of the foraging season and for all females to forage thereafter. Mixed dynamic ESSs, with some foragers and some cheats, may arise if individuals differ in their chances of surviving a foraging interval or if females with new offspring vary their guarding behavior, depending on the numbers of cheats and new cells in the nest. We discuss these predictions in the light of published observations and preliminary data on the halictine bee Lasioglossum (Chilalictus) hemichalceum.     

Keeping the benefits of group cooperation: domain-specific responses to distinct causes of social exclusion

Some people are especially physically adept, others carry dangerous pathogens, some have valuable and rare knowledge, and still others cheat or deceive those around them. Because of these differences, and the costs and benefits they pose, natural selection has crafted mechanisms of partner choice that are selective: some people are chosen as social partners, others are not. When people are not chosen as partners—when they are socially excluded—they lose access to important fitness benefits. Thus, the mind should have adaptations to recapture these benefits by regaining inclusion. Is there one best way to regain inclusion? This is unlikely because there are multiple causes of exclusion; a single response is unlikely to be successful across all possible causes. Instead, distinct causes of exclusion might require adaptively tailored responses. We test whether there are tailored responses to five possible causes of exclusion from a cooperative group: inability to contribute, pathogen infection, free riding, disrupting group coordination, and exit from the group. Our results show that different causes of exclusion lead to distinct profiles of emotions and behavior. Each emotion and behavior profile is adaptively specialized to reverse or mitigate its specific cause of exclusion. Our research shows how taking an evolutionary view of human sociality can help map the psychology of cooperation and exclusion.     

Can You Catch a Liar? How Negative Emotions Affect Brain Responses when Lying or Telling the Truth

The capacity to deceive others is a complex mental skill that requires the ability to suppress truthful information. The polygraph is widely used in countries such as the USA to detect deception. However, little is known about the effects of emotional processes (such as the fear of being found guilty despite being innocent) on the physiological responses that are used to detect lies. The aim of this study was to investigate the time course and neural correlates of untruthful behavior by analyzing electrocortical indexes in response to visually presented neutral and affective questions. Affective questions included sexual, shameful or disgusting topics. A total of 296 questions that were inherently true or false were presented to 25 subjects while ERPs were recorded from 128 scalp sites. Subjects were asked to lie on half of the questions and to answer truthfully on the remaining half. Behavioral and ERP responses indicated an increased need for executive control functions, namely working memory, inhibition and task switching processes, during deceptive responses. Deceptive responses also elicited a more negative N400 over the prefrontal areas and a smaller late positivity (LP 550–750 ms) over the prefrontal and frontal areas. However, a reduction in LP amplitude was also elicited by truthful affective responses. The failure to observe a difference in LP responses across conditions likely results from emotional interference. A swLORETA inverse solution was computed on the N400 amplitude (300–400 ms) for the dishonest – honest contrast. These results showed the activation of the superior, medial, middle and inferior frontal gyri (BA9, 11, 47) and the anterior cingulate cortex during deceptive responses. Our results conclude that the N400 amplitude is a reliable neural marker of deception.     

Social neuroscience of disgust

Disgust can be thought of as an affective system that has evolved to detect signs of pathogens, parasite and toxins as well as to stimulate behaviors that reduce the risk of their acquisition. Disgust incorporates social cognitive mechanisms to regulate exposure to and, or anticipate and avoid exposure to pathogens and toxins. Social cognition entails the acquisition of social information about others (ie, social recognition) and from others (ie, social learning). This involves recognizing and assessing other individuals and the pathogen/parasite/contamination/toxin threat they pose and deciding about when and how to interact with and, or avoid them. Social cognition provides a frame‐work for examining the expression of disgust and the associated neurobiological mechanisms. Here, we briefly consider the relations between social cognition and pathogen/parasite/toxin avoidance behaviors. We briefly discuss aspects of: (1) the odor mediated social recognition of actual and potentially infected individuals and the impact of parasite/pathogen threat on disgust mate and social partner choice; (2) the roles of “out‐groups” (strangers, unfamiliar individuals) and “in‐groups” (familiar individuals) in the expression of disgust and pathogen avoidance behaviors; (3) individual and social learning of disgust and empathy for disgust; (4) toxin elicited disgust and anticipatory disgust; (5) the neurobiological mechanisms, and in particular the roles of the nonapeptide, oxytocin and estrogenic mechanism associated with social cognition and the expression of disgust. These findings on the social neuroscience of disgust have a direct bearing on our understanding of the roles of disgust in shaping human and nonhuman social behavior.     

On the relationship of emotional abilities and prosocial behavior

The ability to perceive and infer the meaning of facial expressions has been considered a critical component of emotional intelligence being essential for successful social functioning: Longitudinal findings suggest that the ability to recognize emotion cues is related to positive social interactions. Moreover, pronounced recognition abilities for at least some emotions facilitate prosocial behavior in everyday situations. Integrating paradigms from behavioral economics and psychometrics, we used an interdisciplinary approach to study the relationship between prosociality as trait cooperativeness and the ability to recognize emotions in others. We measured emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) using a multivariate test battery. We captured prosocial behavior in standard socio-economic games, along with spontaneous emotion expressions. Structural equation modeling revealed no significant relationship between overall ERA and prosocial behavior. However, modeling emotion-specific factors suggested that more prosocial individuals are better in recognizing fear and tend to express more spontaneous emotions during the prisoner's dilemma. In all, cooperative individuals seem to be more sensitive to the distress of others and more expressive, possibly fostering reciprocal interactions with like-minded others.     

Cheating in mutualism: defection of Yucca baccata against its yucca moths

Yucca baccata cheats in its obligate pollination/seed predation mutualism with yucca moths. Although all individuals use the pollination services of yucca moths, many individuals do not reciprocate in sustaining yucca moth larvae. Cheating is associated with the morphology of Y. baccata pistils. In Y. baccata , the apex of the ovary contains only inviable ovules, and there are two distinct flower types, one of which has twice as many potentially viable ovules as the other. Because yucca moths oviposit at the apex of Y. baccata ovaries, larvae in flowers with few viable ovules fail to encounter viable ovules and therefore perish. Inflorescences generally have just one flower type, implying that some individuals cheat whereas others maintain the yucca moth population. Our most surprising observation, however, is that although the proportion of cheaters should be low, over 70% of Y. baccata individuals cheat. We hypothesize that both density- and frequency-dependent processes maintain a balance of cheaters and noncheaters in this system.     

Effects of Spider Chemotactile Cues on Arthropod Behavior

Predation risk can strongly affect the behavior of prey species. However, empirical evidence for changes in behavior driven by spider cues is restricted to relatively few taxa. Here, we conducted a series of behavioral experiments to test for changes in activity among a wide range of terrestrial arthropods. We confronted 13 insect and eight spider species with chemotactile cues of three spider species. We applied two different experimental setups: In the ‘no-choice experiment’ prey individuals were either put on control filter papers or on filter papers previously occupied by a spider. In the ‘choice experiment’, the prey individuals were able to choose between filter paper halves with and without spider cues. In both setups, the response to spider cues depended significantly on prey species, with some species increasing and others decreasing their activity. Surprisingly few prey species responded to the spider cues at all. Our results indicate that predator recognition upon contact with cue bearing filter papers is strongly prey-specific and that behavioral effects driven by spider chemotactile cues are an exception rather than the rule among terrestrial arthropods.     

Public charity offer as a proximate factor of evolved reputation-building strategy: an experimental analysis of a real-life situation

Although theoretical considerations suggest that a considerable portion of human altruism is driven by concerns about reputation, few experimental studies have examined the psychological correlates of individual decisions in real-life situations. Here we demonstrate that more subjects were willing to give assistance to unfamiliar people in need if they could make their charity offers in the presence of their group mates than in a situation where the offers remained concealed from others. In return, those who were willing to participate in a particular charitable activity received significantly higher scores than others on scales measuring sympathy and trustworthiness. Finally, a multiple regression analysis revealed that while several personality and behavior traits (cooperative ability, Machiavellianism, sensitivity to norms, and sex) play a role in the development of prosocial behavior, the possibility of gaining reputation within the group remains a measurable determinant of charitable behavior.     

Where Next? Group Coordination and Collective Decision Making by Primates

Primate groups need to remain coordinated in their activities and collectively decide when and where to travel if they are to accrue the benefits and minimize the costs of sociality. The achievement of coordinated activity and group decision making therefore has important implications for individual survival and reproduction. The aim of this special issue is to bring together a collection of empirical, theoretical, and commentary articles by primatologists studying this rapidly expanding topic. In this article, we introduce the contributions within the special issue and provide a background to the topic. We begin by focusing on decisions that involve a collective transition between a resting and a moving state, a transition we term making the move. We examine whether specific predeparture behaviors seen during transitions represent intentional processes or more simple response facilitation. Next we classify decisions according to the contribution of individual group members, and describe how, and why, certain individuals can have a disproportionate influence over group-mates?? behavior. We then review how primate groups make decisions on the move. In particular, we focus on how variability in group size and spatial organization helps or hinders information transmission and coordination. We end with a discussion of new tools and methodology that will allow future investigators to address some outstanding questions in primate coordination and decision-making research. We conclude that a better integration of concepts and terminology, along with a focus on how individuals integrate environmental and social information, will be critical to developing a satisfactory understanding of collective patterns of behavior in primate systems.     

A ‘crying wolf’ game of interspecific kleptoparasitic mutualism

We model a potentially mutualistic interaction between a species making antipredator alarm calls and a species which eavesdrops on those calls. Callers may or may not make deceptive alarm calls in order to kleptoparasitize food from eavesdroppers, which in turn may either heed or ignore all alarm calls. The two most likely outcomes in our model are either maximally deceptive callers and maximally trusting eavesdroppers, or persistently cycling strategy frequencies. The latter is favoured by low predator density, low density of any alternative honest alarm-calling species, ability of eavesdroppers to preferentially heed calls when costs of doing so are low and, in some cases, low food availability.     

Group decision making in fission-fusion societies: evidence from two-field experiments in Bechstein's bats

Group decisions are required when group coordination is beneficial, but individuals can choose between alternatives. Despite the increased interest in animal group decision making, there is a lack of experimental field studies that investigate how animals with conflicting information make group decisions. In particular, no field studies have considered the influence of fission-fusion behaviour (temporary splitting into subgroups) on group decisions. We studied group decision making in two wild Bechstein's bat colonies, which are fission-fusion societies of stable individual composition. Since they frequently switch communal roosts, colony members must regularly make group decisions over where to roost. In the two-field experiments, we provided marked individuals with conflicting information about the suitability of potential roosts. We investigated whether conflicting information led to group decisions that followed a 'unanimous' or a 'majority' rule, or increased colony fission. Individual behaviour suggests that bats considered both their own information and the behaviour of others when deciding where to roost. Group decisions about communal roosts reflected the information available to a majority of the bats roosting together, but conflicting information led to an increased fission in one colony. Our results suggest that fission-fusion societies allow individuals to avoid majority decisions that are not in their favour.