Scientific approach to finding liars’ intent
A scientific approach to finding liars’ intent
It is fascinating how science brings us closer to not only the physical but also the psychological aspects of human behavior. A team of scientists at Dartmouth engineering has come up with a new approach to detect a speaker’s intent to mislead or lie.
Published in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, the study describes the approach’s framework. The framework could be developed to extract opinions from “fake news,” among other uses. The researchers posit that while a true story can be manipulated into various deceiving forms, the intent, rather than the content of the communication, determines whether the communication is deceptive or not. For example, the speaker could be misinformed or make a wrong assumption, meaning the speaker made an unintentional error but did not attempt to deceive.
The researchers developed a unique approach and the resulting algorithm that can tell deception apart from all benign communications by retrieving the universal features of deceptive reasoning. However, the framework is currently limited by the amount of data needed to measure a speaker’s deviation from their past arguments; the study used data from a 2009 survey of 100 participants on their opinions on controversial topics, as well as a 2011 dataset of 800 real and 400 fictitious reviews of the same 20 hotels.
In the study, the researchers use the popular 2001 film Ocean’s Eleven to illustrate how the framework can be used to examine a deceiver’s arguments, which in reality may go against his true beliefs, resulting in a falsified final expectation. For example, in the movie, a group of thieves breaks into a bank vault while simultaneously revealing to the owner that he is being robbed in order to negotiate. The thieves supply the owner with false information, namely that they will only take half the money if the owner doesn’t call the police. However, the thieves expect the owner to call the police, which he does, so the thieves then disguise themselves as police to steal the entirety of the vault contents.
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