How does one deal with the possibility of deception? Extant
literature has mostly focused on identifying deception via cue
detection. However, how we reason about the possibility of
deception remains under-explored. We use a novel formalism
to expose the complexity of this reasoning problem (e.g.
separating the uncertainty of an honest mistake, from willful
deception), in the process highlighting several reasoning
errors regarding deception. Notably, we show reasoners to
make substantial errors when reasoning about a (possibly)
deceptive source in isolation (including base rate neglect
errors), but find that reasoning improves when further
(independently sourced) corroborative or contradicting reports
are introduced.