Department of Economics, Middlesex University, The Burroughs, London NW4 4BT, UK.
Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor, Koroška cesta 160, SI-2000 Maribor, Slovenia.
J R Soc Interface. 2019 Jul 26;16(156):20190211. doi: 10.1098/rsif.2019.0211. Epub 2019 Jul 31.
Lies can have profoundly negative consequences for individuals, groups and even for societies. Understanding how lying evolves and when it proliferates is therefore of significant importance for our personal and societal well-being. To that effect, we here study the sender-receiver game in well-mixed populations with methods of statistical physics. We use the Monte Carlo method to determine the stationary frequencies of liars and believers for four different lie types. We consider altruistic white lies that favour the receiver at a cost to the sender, black lies that favour the sender at a cost to the receiver, spiteful lies that harm both the sender and the receiver, and Pareto white lies that favour both the sender and the receiver. We find that spiteful lies give rise to trivial behaviour, where senders quickly learn that their best strategy is to send a truthful message, while receivers likewise quickly learn that their best strategy is to believe the sender's message. For altruistic white lies and black lies, we find that most senders lie while most receivers do not believe the sender's message, but the exact frequencies of liars and non-believers depend significantly on the payoffs, and they also evolve non-monotonically before reaching the stationary state. Lastly, for Pareto white lies we observe the most complex dynamics, with the possibility of both lying and believing evolving with all frequencies between 0 and 1 in dependence on the payoffs. We discuss the implications of these results for moral behaviour in human experiments.
谎言可能会对个人、群体甚至社会产生深远的负面影响。因此，了解谎言是如何演变的，以及何时会泛滥，对于我们的个人和社会福祉具有重要意义。为此，我们使用统计物理学的方法研究了混合人群中的发送者-接收者博弈。我们使用蒙特卡罗方法确定了四种不同类型谎言的说谎者和信谎者的稳定频率。我们考虑了利他的善意谎言，这些谎言以牺牲发送者为代价使接收者受益；恶意谎言，这些谎言以牺牲接收者为代价使发送者受益；恶意谎言，这些谎言既伤害发送者又伤害接收者；以及帕累托善意谎言，这些谎言使发送者和接收者都受益。我们发现，恶意谎言会导致微不足道的行为，发送者很快就会意识到他们的最佳策略是发送真实信息，而接收者也会很快意识到他们的最佳策略是相信发送者的信息。对于利他的善意谎言和恶意谎言，我们发现大多数发送者说谎，而大多数接收者不相信发送者的信息，但说谎者和不信者的确切频率在很大程度上取决于收益，而且它们在达到稳定状态之前也呈非单调演变。最后，对于帕累托善意谎言，我们观察到最复杂的动态，说谎和相信的可能性都以收益为依赖，在 0 到 1 之间的所有频率上演变。我们讨论了这些结果对人类实验中道德行为的影响。
