Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When the interests of interlocutors are not aligned, either partymay wish to avoid truthful disclosure. A sender wishing toconceal the truth from a receiver may lie by providing falseinformation, mislead by actively encouraging the receiver toreach a false conclusion, or simply be uninformative by provid-ing little or no relevant information. Lying entails moral andother hazards, such as detection and its consequences, and isthus often avoided. We focus here on the latter two strategies,arguably more pernicious and prevalent, but not without theirown drawbacks. We argue and show in two studies that whenchoosing between these options, senders consider the level ofsuspicion likely to be exercised on the part of the receiver andhow much truth must be revealed in order to mislead. Extend-ing Bayesian models of cooperative communication to includehigher level inference regarding the helpfulness of the senderleads to insight into the strategies employed in non-cooperativecontexts.