The Setting of the Runestone

The small settlement of Kensington is situated in the west-central part of Minnesota, some 23 miles from Alexandria, which is the largest local town. Minnesota, like several other north-central states of the United States, has a predominantly immigrant population largely of Scandinavian and northern Germanic ancestry. Even today, intrinsic cultural influences remain obvious, from institutional names to the specialties of the local diet [1]. Various claims have been made as to the different dates of initial occupation, but the generally accepted era is around the late 1860s [2]. Indeed, the first government survey of this particular region was made in 1866, although settlers began to move into the locality of Douglas County around 1858 when Minnesota first became a state [3]. Like many lands of the Mississippi headwaters, the prairie around Kensington is agriculturally fertile, but not every immigrant was lucky enough to secure a prime section. Some of the rolling hills are predominantly rock and stone rather than soil and are often surrounded by marshlands and overrun by stunted woods. Such land was still available in 1890 when a thirty-six-year-old immigrant of Scandinavian descent named Olof Ohman [4] decided to grub his farm from this section of Minnesota, rather than trekking west to the still open plains of the Dakota Territory.

This book is about deception. It does not cover all forms of deception but focuses on one particular aspect that I refer to as cognitive deception. In this type of deception you are not fooled by some clever sleight of hand. In fact, these cognitive deceptions have been referred to rather as sleights of mind. With cognitive deceptions you are not led into error by some failure or misdirection of your sensory apparatus. In contrast, cognitive deceptions are purposely induced failures of attention, memory, and decision-making capacities. In general, the issue is set before you in a relatively clear and unambiguous manner, and unlike single, one-off events, cognitive deceptions are, by and large, on permanent display. The physical evidence is, in most cases, right in front of you and can be examined repeatedly and even subjected to physical tests and evaluation. These artifacts do not disappear when any particularly skeptical inquisitor approaches. They do not suffer from any sort of Taylor’s so-called shyness effects. The objects and entities discussed here do not vanish when a camera or even a mass spectrometer approaches them. Yet important aspects of cognition are involved that induce people into accepting the deception, sometimes even in spite of the results of physical experimentation and examination.

I have framed the present book around a number of stories. Each of the examples discussed exposes different facets of cognitive deception. However, at heart, they have a great deal in common. It is these common elements that form the basis of my discussion of the psychology of cognitive deception, the explorations of which are interpolated between the respective stories. Although each example provides an intriguing case on its own and can be read as an individual study in potential hoax and deception, the purpose here is to take the respective lessons and to weld them into a unified theory of cognitive deception. It is my eventual hope to elaborate that theory beyond cognitive deceptions alone to include other forms such as sensory illusion and motor deception, but that is for the future and not the focus of this text.

Introduction

So far, we have discussed various case studies of deception and have examined some of the ways in which people process the information associated with deception. It has also been stated that sensory deceptions are mostly associated with bottom-up processing of sources of incoming environmental stimulation and the immediate perceptions they generate. In contrast, cognitive deceptions are mostly mediated by top-down processes that feature prominent access to long-term memories and are regulated by the active direction of attention. What needs to be explored now is exactly how individuals decide on whether the information they are of ered is true or false. To do this, we have to understand more about how humans make decisions in general.

Two Faces of Decision Making

To begin to understand how people make decisions, and particularly how decision making is linked to bottom-up and top-down processes, it is best to return to the model of human capacities presented earlier (see Figure III.1 over). On the outer ring we can see that there is one pathway that leads directly from the registration of information (the information flux, on the upper let of the diagram), directly through sensory registration to the decision process, and immediately on to the response selection and execution phase.

Introception to Deduction

Deception is a part of life. Deception can be regarded as one of the essential characteristics that energize the very struggle for life itself [3]. The process of deception permeates virtually all of the animal kingdom [4]. Indeed, the occurrences of, and variations in, the capacities of animals to camouflage themselves and deceive their natural predators had a profound influence on Charles Darwin and the first conceptual development of his theory of evolution. Deception is also something we encounter throughout our personal lives. It is a behavioral characteristic that forms the basis of some of our original cultural narratives. For example, Homer’s Iliad, one of the earliest of all human recorded stories, recounts a tale in which the deception of the Trojan Horse plays the central role. The Bible itself proposes that the present form of human existence began with two acts of deception: the first was the Devil’s deception of Eve and the second was Eve’s subsequent deception of Adam [5]. It is within such religious narratives that we find the first links between deception and sin. As a result, we often conceive of humans involved in deceptions as doing something that is “bad” or even “evil.” In general, we have come to consider it wrong to deceive others.

Introduction

There are few heroes better known than King Arthur. To the peoples of Celtic origin as well as good and true Englishmen everywhere, Arthur is a figure of immense symbolic significance. He is the monarch who promised to return, and in White’s borrowed but immortal phrase, he remains “the once and future King” [1]. As well as being a hero, Arthur is also a mystery, as there are, in reality, two Arthurs. One Arthur is the hero of myth and legend while the other is a very real and important historical figure of the early centuries of British life [2]. The immediate question arises as to which one we are dealing with here: Are we looking at the legend of Camelot with its Knights and Round Table, or is it the chieftain of early British tribes in and around the time of the final withdrawal of Roman control from Britain? Sometimes it is easy to tease apart these two versions of Arthur and sometimes it is almost impossible. The historic Arthur is indeed an intriguing and mysterious individual and certainly worthy of serious academic study in his own right. However, the Arthur of this story is evidently more the one of symbol and myth. It is this mythical dimension, as represented in the stories first told of him by Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1130, that raises him from the rank and file of early British rulers to the status of immortal, national, and indeed international hero [3]. It is somewhat strange then to begin this story of the Arthurian myth with a very clear focus on actual historical events. However, this is what I have done.

Introduction

An account of Piltdown Man is unlike any of the other stories of cognitive deception discussed in this book. This is because we now know categorically that the Piltdown remains are, in fact, a hoax. Therefore, we naturally approach this story with a strong propensity toward a level of hindsight bias that encourages us to be wise after the event [1]. Our first thought, therefore, should be to appreciate that many of the individuals involved with the Piltdown finds were as certain of its authenticity in their time as we are now of its fraudulence. The real story of the Piltdown hoax, however, does not begin with the findings of the bones themselves. Rather, it is framed by the context of the times and especially the continuing aftershocks of Charles Darwin’s pivotal proposition concerning the evolution of life on our planet [2]. If what Darwin had said concerning evolution were true, then the theory predicted that there ought to be recognizable fossils of the ancestors of modern human beings connecting us to our nonhuman forebears. For a number of decades, the race was on to find the definitive evidence of this “missing link.”

To the great chagrin of the British scientific community, intriguing evidence of earlier hominids had been found in Belgium as well as in both Germany and France, the great European rivals of the British Empire [3]. However, after the turn of the century, with the Edwardian era replacing the venerable Victorian age, no such prestigious fossils had been found in “England’s green and pleasant land.” That Britain may not have actually been an island at the time that some of these European ancestors existed mattered not one whit to the members of the British establishment; the implied insult persisted. The geopolitical rivals had their “early man” while England did not. The French even had a derogatory term for their English colleagues; they called them “pebble hunters.” It was in this receptive and fertile soil of fervent British patriotism that the Piltdown remains, produced by the amateur scientist Charles Dawson, so quickly took root. His discoveries were evidently a manifest “rival to the German’s Ape Man.” Eventually, the Piltdown fossils were to become much more than this and ended up being, arguably, the most explosive case of scientific fraud that has ever been uncovered [4].

Elements of Deception

Up to this point, I have provided a general introduction to cognitive deception and recounted two stories in which deception, or at least potential deception, has played a central role. We need now to take a step back from the specific details of each of the respective stories and begin to explore the overall principles involved. To do this, I look specifically to examine the fundamental psychological dimensions that underlie deception. As noted in the more academic chapters that follow, the human aspects of deception have grown from their more general form found in the animal world. We have seen that deceptions in the animal world have their genesis in life’s overall struggle for survival. Primitive forms of deception have thus been around since life itself began. Basic forms of deception are largely illusions to confound the senses. While some deceptions are unintentional, the form with which we are centrally concerned here are those of the conscious kind brought about by the intentional mind. Our examination of these forms of deception must therefore focus on the principles of human psychology.

Human beings typically categorize the domain of deception through reference to a variety of dif erent semantic labels. These include terms such as forgeries, practical jokes, impostures, conjuring tricks, confidence games, consumer frauds, military deceptions, white lies, feints, ploys, gambling scams, and psychic hoaxes, together with other associated labels [1]. Obviously, these dif ering facets of misrepresentation overlap to some greater or lesser extent. In addition to these dif ering terms, we also tend to class deceptions according to an associated moral judgment.