The Deterrence of Deception in Socio-Technical Systems

我们组建了一个由计算机科学家和心理学家组成的团队，对欺骗进行突破性的研究。这不仅是网络犯罪的核心问题，也是人类行为的核心问题。欺骗是合作的另一面；当我们的祖先进化到能够在更大的群体中合作时，我们也进化出了欺骗的能力——以及发现他人欺骗的能力。这包括欺骗自己的能力，这反过来又帮助我们欺骗他人。网上商业和社交生活的发展在许多方面改变了欺骗行为。其中一些基本上是机械的：一方面，骗子很容易创建好的银行网站副本，而另一方面，公司可以收集和分析越来越多的数据来检测欺诈行为。其他变化会影响我们的行为；例如，随着交易变得越来越没有人情味，对欺诈的抑制就变得越来越少。比起欺骗一个人，欺骗一个网站的错误感觉要小得多，而且随着越来越多的商业活动在网上进行，欺诈行为也在上升。寻找让交易变得更加个性化的方法有很强的现实理由，这也是我们调查的一个方面。但还有更大、更深层次的问题。现有的欺骗研究几乎都是针对静态的情况，即实验对象能否分辨出另一个人是否在撒谎。答案是“通常不会”；在实验室里，我们不擅长发现人们说谎，因为风险很低，而且没有互动。我们将通过研究如何在互动环境中阻止欺骗，将其提升到一个新的水平。我们有一长串想法想要测试，通过建立一个框架，让人们在与机械的、匿名的、部分可识别的或有社会联系的玩家一起玩游戏的条件下，玩家可以作弊但不能惩罚，惩罚但不能作弊，或者两者兼而有之。我们将探索“作弊”受试者认为他们违反了社会规范的情况，而在社会上可以接受的情况下，比如在在线扑克中虚张声势。我们将在在线访谈中进行实验，探索被试在何种情况下可以互动地察觉欺骗。另一个主题是探索监控，无论是人还是软件，或者两者兼而有之，在多大程度上可以起到威慑作弊的作用。最后，我们将调查所有这些与隐私感知的关系，这样我们就可以更好地理解哪种形式的欺诈监督是可以接受的，也是有效的。我们研究的目的不仅仅是提出更好的机制和设计原则来阻止电子商务网站和社交网络中的欺骗行为。它是通过探索在线互动创造的不同视角，并允许我们操纵，加深我们对欺骗如何起作用的基本理解。这将在基础科学的层面上，使我们能够更好地理解人类的意义，以及我们的人性在我们都将依赖的复杂社会技术系统中得到表达、实现和发展的潜力。

We have assembled a team of computer scientists and psychologists to do breakthrough research on deception. This is not just the basic problem at the heart of cyber-crime, but is central to human behaviour. Deception is the flip side of cooperation; as our ancestors evolved to cooperate in larger groups, so also we evolved the ability to deceive - and to detect deception in others. This includes the ability to deceive ourselves, which in turn helps us deceive others.The move of business and social life online is changing deception in many ways. Some of these are essentially mechanical: on the one hand it's easy for crooks to create good copies of bank websites, while on the other hand companies can collect and analyse ever more data to detect fraud. Other changes affect our behaviour; for example, as transactions become more impersonal, the inhibitions against cheating become less. It feels less wrong to defraud a website than to defraud a person, and as more commerce goes online, fraud is rising. There is a strong practical reason for finding ways of making transactions feel more personal again, and this is one aspect of our investigation.But there are much bigger and deeper issues. Existing deception research has almost all dealt with the static case of whether the experimental subject could tell whether another person was lying. The answer is "usually not"; we're not good at detecting people telling lies in the laboratory where the stakes are low and there is no interaction. We will move this to a new level by studying how we can deter deception in interactive contexts. We have a long list of ideas we want to test, by building a framework in which people play games in conditions with players who are mechanical, anonymous, partly identifiable or socially connected, and where players can cheat but not punish, punish but not cheat, or both. We will explore conditions where "cheating" subjects believe they are breaking social norms against conditions where deception is socially acceptable, such as bluffing in online poker. We will do experiments in online interviewing to explore the circumstances in which subjects can detect deception interactively. Another thread will be exploring the extent to which surveillance, by humans, by software or both, can act as a deterrent to cheating. Finally we will investigate how all this relates to the perception of privacy, so we can better understand what forms of fraud surveillance are acceptable as well as effective.The aim of our research is not merely to come up with better mechanisms and design principles for deterring deception at e-commerce websites, and indeed in social networks. It is to deepen our fundamental understanding of how deception works by exploring the different perspectives that online interaction creates, and allows us to manipulate. This will, at the level of basic science, enable us to understand better what it means to be human, and the potential for our humanity to be expressed, realised and developed in the complex socio-technical systems on which we are all coming to depend.