At election time, when accusations of deception run high, “The Lying Game,” a 2021 Negev University study by Cohen and Zultan, sheds light on the ways deception shows up. The authors consider the moral implications of the three most common forms of deception. All three forms involve communicating information known to be untrue to another person with the intention that the other person believes the information to be true.
The authors offer the following definitions of these three kinds of deception:
The experiment covers financial conflicts of interest, misrepresenting unfavorable information by withholding information about potential losses, presenting partial information rather than all facts, and gaslighting by convincing recipients of communication that what they see is other than what they see. These are economic circumstances often encountered by government officials and their constituents.
The researchers consider whether one form of lying is more harmful than others or more likely to be believed and discuss previous research. They assert that the bedrock of human communication........