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Glossary

  • Absence of information: A flaw in human reasoning in which people asked to make judgments based on specified information seldom think about the fact that other, important information might not be supplied to them.
  • Ad hominenattack: A logical fallacy in which a person makes a personal attack on his or her opponent rather than addressing their argument.
  • Advance fee scheme: A type of fraud in which a person is induced to pay for access to an opportunity that is promised to provide even greater rewards, for example, paying for information to set up a work-from-home business, only to find that the real probability of earning money in the proposed manner is nonexistent or minimal.
  • Affinity group fraud: Fraud that targets members of a group that share characteristics with the person perpetrating the fraud, such as ethnicity or religion, with the implication that the perpetrator was a particularly trusted member of the group. Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme is often cited as an example of affinity fraud because he is Jewish, as are most of his victims.
  • Anchoring: A cognitive strategy that can lead to incorrect judgments by making estimates beginning with some starting point, then adjusting that estimate upward or downward. The original starting point may exert a strong influence on the final estimate or judgment because the person is reluctant to abandon it, even if evidence suggests that they should.
  • Argument from ignorance: A logical fallacy in which something is asserted to be true because it has not been proven false.
  • Art of War, The: A Chinese treatise, probably written between 500 and 300 b.c.e., attributed to the military official Sun Tzu; the treatise also includes commentary by 11 other writers, added over a period of centuries after the original writing. It includes one section on deception in military operations, which Sun Tzu says is a requirement of military strategy, and also discusses the usefulness of military deception in many other sections.
  • Automatic writing: A purported psychic phenomenon in which an individual touches a sheet of paper with a writing implement and the implement is said to write out messages of its own accord.
  • Availability rule: A type of bias in estimating the probability of some event, in which people judge as more common the events they can easily imagine or for which they already have numerous memories. For instance, someone whose mother died of lung cancer is likely to judge the risk of smoking as higher than someone who does not know anyone with lung cancer, although the personal knowledge has no bearing on the actual risk.
  • Base rate fallacy: A fallacy in which a person ignores information about the base rate, or prior probability, of an event in making a judgment about a single event.
  • Begging the question: A type of fallacy in which the premise assumes the conclusion rather than proving it.
  • Bias for causality: The tendency of people to create causal explanations for random situations as a way of making sense out of their lives, a fact that makes it difficult to discard beliefs that are incorporated into such explanations, even if those beliefs are based on evidence that has been discredited.
  • Big Lie: A propaganda technique used in Germany in the Nazi era, traced back to 1925 when Adolf Hitler described a form of this technique in Mein Kampf. The concept of the Big Lie was popularized by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, who said that it was possible to convince people of a lie if it was big enough and repeated often enough.
  • Bilocation: The ability of a person or object to be in two places at once, a power claimed by various magicians and religious figures.
  • Boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome: The tendency for someone who is known to lie or exaggerate to not be believed when he or she is telling the truth. The reference is to one of Aesop's fables, in which the people of a village ignore a shepherd boy's cries for help because in the past he repeatedly made false claims that his flock was being attacked by a wolf.
  • Cambridge investigation: An 1857 event in which several well-known mediums attempted to claim a $500 prize offered by a newspaper, the Boston Courier, if they could produce evidence of spiritualistic phenomena to the satisfaction of three Harvard professors: Louis S. Agassiz, E. N. Horsford, and Benjamin Pierce. No satisfactory evidence was produced, and the prize remained unclaimed. The event is named after the location of Harvard University, which is in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  • Cardiff giant: A stone sculpture created by George Hull and buried in the ground near Cardiff, New York, in 1869. The “giant” was discovered by workmen and became a popular attraction, believed by some to be the petrified remains of a human giant. Upon closer examination, it was declared a fake, but the public continued to pay to see it.
  • Chain referral scheme:See pyramid scheme.
  • Circular reasoning: A type of logical fallacy in which the evidence for the validity of an assertion assumes that validity; in effect, it assumes what it claims to prove.
  • Cognitive dissonance: A psychological concept explaining the discomfort that a person experiences when one of their beliefs is contradicted by their experiences or other evidence. In order to reduce this discomfort, the person may change their beliefs to reflect reality, or may reject the evidence of reality in order to hold on to their beliefs.
  • Concealed information test: A method of questioning introduced in the 1950s to determine the truthfulness of someone's claim that they were involved in a crime; the test determined whether the person who was questioned had information that only someone involved with the crime would have.
  • Cottingley fairies: A famous hoax that fooled, among others, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote an article about them in 1920. The basis of the hoax was a series of photographs of fairies, which were later shown to be paper cutouts from a children's book.
  • Cramming: A type of fraud in which small charges are added to a legitimate bill, such as for phone service, usually by a third party.
  • Crop circles: Geometric patterns created in grain fields that began appearing in the United Kingdom in 1979 and have appeared in many other countries since. Initially claimed by some as evidence of visitors from outer space, they were later revealed to be the work of two Englishmen and other people who imitated them.
  • CSI-COP: The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, an organization founded in Buffalo, New York, in 1976.
  • Eyewitness: Someone who has direct knowledge of an event, such as by hearing or seeing it. In the law, eyewitness testimony has traditionally been considered strong evidence, although psychological experiments have demonstrated that eyewitnesses are far from infallible and the memory of events can be manipulated by questioning or by the later introduction of other information about the events.
  • Fakelore: Manufactured folklore presented as if it were traditional. The term was coined by Richard M. Dorson to describe American legends such as Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, which were known to have been created by particular writers rather than being characters in authentic traditional tales.
  • False memory syndrome: A condition in which a person strongly believes in memories that are in fact untrue; the term was popularized in the 1990s by Pamela and Peter Freyd, who were accused by an adult daughter of childhood sexual abuse. The Freyds' contention, shared by many psychologists, is that false memories can be created during the course of memory therapy, and the patient has no way to distinguish between false and true memories.
  • Federal Trade Commission: A U.S. regulatory agency established in 1914 by the Federal Trade Commission Act and charged with protecting consumers from deceptive advertising and ensuring fair and ethical competition among businesses.
  • Flashbulb memory: A detailed, vivid, and accurate memory of a moment in a person's life, analogous to that which would be captured by a photograph, were a photograph able to prioritize certain details over others. Despite many claims of flashbulb memories, generally in connection with some major, emotionally arousing event (e.g., receiving news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy), not all psychologists believe that they are different from other memories, or that they are particularly accurate or stable.
  • FOAF: An acronym for “friend of a friend,” a source often cited in urban legends. The point of FOAF stories is that their veracity is automatically suspect, although possibly believed by the teller because the source of information is so distant from the teller—it didn't happen to them or to someone they knew, but rather to someone two connections removed from them.
  • Forced feedback: A technique to plant false memories in a person's mind by presenting the person with a fictional summary of an event that actually occurred. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus developed this technique to demonstrate how false memories could be planted in individuals; often, her subjects accepted her false version of events as true and part of their actual experience, and some would make the false version of events more vivid in recalling them than they were as originally presented to them.
  • 419 fraud: Also known as the Nigerian fraud, a scam operated by mail or e-mail in which an individual receives a message purportedly from a government official, asking them to send money or reveal confidential information (e.g., bank account number) in order to receive a percentage of a sum the author is trying to transfer out of their country. The name refers to section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code, which is violated by this type of fraud.
  • Gambler's fallacy: A mistaken belief that the laws of probability will hold true in the short run as well as the long run and/or the related belief that independent events are affected by previous events. For instance, if a fair coin is flipped five times and heads result each time, one may believe that the next flip is more likely to be tails, when in fact heads and tails are equally likely on each flip.
  • Hindsight biases: Biases that frequently emerge when evaluating intelligence reports, including overestimation of the accuracy of past judgments, underestimation of how much has been learned from intelligence reports, and the tendency to believe that events were more forseeable than they really were.
  • Identity theft: A criminal act in which a thief obtains information (e.g., social security numbers or credit card numbers) that allows them to assume another person's identity; the information is then used for other criminal activities, such as stealing from the individual's bank account.
  • Ignoranti elenchi: A logical fallacy in which an argument is not relevant to the issue under discussion; the argument itself may or may not be valid.
  • Illusory correlation: Assigning causal explanations to observed covariation that may in fact be due to chance or other factors not considered.
  • Lake Wobegon effect: The result found in many standardized testing situations in schools, in which most or all the children are found to be performing above average. Since in the long run about half should be above average and about half below, if most or all are found to be above average, this suggests that the results are invalid due to teaching to the test, score inflation, teacher cheating, etc. The name refers to the fictional Lake Wobegon featured on Garrison Keillor's radio program A Prairie Home Companion, where “all the children are above average.”
  • Law of small numbers: A humorous label applied to the common tendency to overvalue information gained from small samples of data without taking into account the high degree of variability in data points. The name reverses the law of large numbers, a true principle in statistics that a sufficiently large sample can provide a good estimate of the characteristics of a population.
  • Letter of credit fraud: A type of fraud in which an individual is offered the opportunity to invest in a letter of credit and is promised large investment returns. However, it is impossible to invest in a letter of credit because it is simply a guarantee issued by a bank in connection with goods shipped internationally.
  • Liar paradox: A sentence of this type: “This sentence is a lie.” This paradox has been discussed by philosophers since ancient times because it is at once true and false.
  • Malingering: Fabricating information for personal gain by drawing attention to oneself or by harming someone else.
  • “Man-who” syndrome: An example of the tendency for information with a personal connection to be overvalued in comparison with abstract information. For instance, statistical evidence of the dangers of tobacco consumption may be ignored because a person knows a man who smoked for years and never got sick.
  • Medicare fraud: Fraud that makes improper claims to be paid by the Medicare system, the U.S. system of health insurance for people over age 65 or those with disabilities. Examples include billing for medical equipment that is not needed, billing for unneeded tests, or billing for services never performed.
  • Misinformation effect: A concept developed by Elizabeth Loftus in 1978 and later, in which recall of an event may be adversely affected by other information presented between the time an event is encoded in memory and the time it is recalled. Hence, eyewitness recall of an event may be affected by irrelevant or false information received by the witness after the fact, such as hearing descriptions of the event by others.
  • Nigerian fraud:See 419 fraud.
  • On the Witness Stand: A book published in 1908 by the German American psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, detailing the results of psychological studies suggesting that eyewitness testimony was not as infallible as commonly believed.
  • Online auction scam: A financial fraud committed over the Internet, in which someone runs an auction on a Web site, such as eBay, and accepts payment but never delivers the advertised goods or delivers goods less valuable than those that were advertised.
  • Operation Dirty Play: An investigation carried out in 2011 and 2012 by the Broward County, Florida, Sheriff's Department into betting on youth football games. The operation ended with the arrest of nine men and the allegation that young players had been bribed to affect the outcomes of games.
  • Othello error: Falsely accusing a truthful person of lying, based on a predetermined view that the person is lying and by discounting other explanations (e.g., stress) for their apparently suspicious behavior. The reference is to Shakespeare's play, Othello, in which the title character misjudges his wife's reaction to the death of another character and believes her to be unfaithful to him.
  • Overestimation of predictability: A cognitive bias in which people are likely to believe that the actions of other people or groups are intentional and result from centralized planning, failing to realize that chance and coincidence often play a large role in the outcome of real-life events.
  • Persistence of discredited evidence: The principle that impressions based on experiences or other evidence are difficult to discard, even if the evidence has been discredited. This is true even in experimental situations in which a test subject is informed that they took part in a manipulated situation, and it is even more persistent in the real world, in which truth and falsehood may be much more ambiguous.
  • Phishing: A type of fraud committed over the Internet, in which an e-mail appears to come from a legitimate company or financial institution and tells the recipient that he or she needs to supply confidential information in order to straighten out a problem with their bank account, credit card account, or other financial institution.
  • Polygraph: A machine that is used to detect whether a person is telling the truth or lying, hence the popular name “lie detector.” Attached to the person answering the questions, the device detects physiological changes such as pulse and blood pressure, which are believed to be beyond conscious control; however, scientific research does not support the accuracy of polygraph testing.
  • Ponzi scheme: A type of fraud in which high financial returns are promised for investment in a business, whereas in fact the only income is provided by new investors. A Ponzi scheme can work for some time, but generally falls apart when it runs out of new investors or the amount of money owed to investors becomes too great. One of the most famous Ponzi schemes of the 20th century was perpetrated by Bernard Madoff, a New York investment advisor who was convicted and sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009.
  • The Prince: A 1532 treatise written by Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli that discusses how to achieve and maintain authority. Rather than endorsing an absolute set of ethical principles, Machiavelli advises that leaders suit their actions to the situation, giving rise to the term Machiavellian to describe ruthless, deceptive behavior.
  • Psychic surgery: A fraudulent practice in which a performer claims to perform surgery on a patient with her or her bare hands and without breaking the patient's skin, while in fact doing sleight-of-hand tricks and presenting blood or tissue from an animal. One well-known practitioner was Tony Agpaoa, who began his practice in the Philippines, and was arrested in 1968 in the United States on charges of medical fraud.
  • Pump and dump: A type of financial fraud in which the price of a security is artificially inflated (the “pump”) through increased trading volume (often by inducing investors who are not a part of the scheme to buy the security), then sold before the price falls (the “dump”).
  • Pyramid scheme: Also known as chain referral schemes, a type of fraud in which a person pays to distribute or franchise a product, but the only real money comes from the sale of the franchises or distributorships.
  • Radiocarbon dating: A method used to establish the approximate age of objects, often used when investigating suspected art or antiquities fraud. The technique is based on the fact that organic materials contain carbon-14, which decays at a steady rate; the amount of carbon-14 remaining in an object can therefore give an approximation of how old it is.
  • Realism: A philosophical point of view that states that the world exists independently of human descriptions of or thoughts about it and that people's thoughts refer to this actual world, so that they may be objectively judged true or false.
  • Recovered memory therapy: A type of psychotherapy aimed at helping a patient recover memories of abuse that were not previously accessible to their conscious mind. Recovered memory therapy is based in part on the finding that about 10 percent of abuse victims forget the abuse, but it is controversial because scientific studies have shown that it is possible to “plant” false memories that an individual cannot distinguish from memories of their actual experiences.
  • Red herring: A device used in speech and writing to distract people from the true subject of an argument.
  • Scudder's American Museum: An entertainment hall opened in 1842 in New York City by P. T. Barnum. The museum included a variety of exhibits, from live animals to freak shows; among the more famous attractions were the Fiji Mermaid and the Siamese Twins Cheng and Eng.
  • Shattered Glass: A 2003 film written and directed by Billy Ray, based on an Atlantic Magazine article by Buzz Bissinger, chronicling the career of New Republic journalist Stephen Glass, who was found to have fabricated many of the stories that he wrote while working for the magazine. The film details the lengths to which Glass—who had formerly worked as a fact checker—went to create a false trail of evidence that would make his stories appear genuine and the personal dynamics within the newsroom that facilitated his deceptions.
  • Shifters: A short-lived Ponzi scheme seen in the United States in 1922, in which college students became members of an organization called the Shifters, paid an initiation fee, and then sought other people to become members in order to make their money back. Various merchandise, such as pins and hats, was also marketed to members.
  • http://Snopes.com: A Web site run by Barbara and David Mikkelson that collects urban legends and rates them as true, false, or undetermined, supplied with available evidence in support of their decision.
  • Spectographic analysis: A method used to investigate suspected cases of art fraud. The technique involves removing a tiny sample of paint, burning it in a flame, and analyzing the resulting spectrum to determine if the paint includes materials not available at the time that the painting was claimed to be created or materials not known to be used by the supposed painter of the work.
  • Strawman fraud: A type of fraud based on the incorrect belief that the U.S. Treasury Department has bank accounts in the name of every U.S. citizen that can be accessed through a procedure known to the person perpetrating the scam. One feature of such scams is that the victim is told to specify their name in all capital letters.
  • Telemarketing fraud: A type of fraud in which someone is contacted by telephone and induced to send money or release confidential information, such as their bank account or credit card number, in order to collect a “free prize” or some other inducement.
  • Thermoluminescence: A method of dating pottery, often used to examine suspected forgeries. The technique is based on the principle that pottery loses its radioactivity when fired but gradually reabsorbs radioactivity from its surroundings. When heated to over 640 degrees Fahrenheit, pottery emits a glow that is brighter in older samples; hence, the glow emitted by a suspected fraud can be compared with that from another of known age.
  • To Tell the Truth: An American television program aired from 1956 to 1968 on CBS and revived in 1991 by NBC. The concept of the show is that a celebrity panel tries to determine which of three contestants is telling the truth about their identity by asking them questions. The true contestant must give true answers, whereas the other two are allowed to lie to try to convince the panel of their identity.
  • United Nations Convention against Corruption: An international legal instrument adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2003 and entered into force on December 14, 2005. Among other things, the convention requires countries to make corrupt acts illegal and to cooperate with other countries in the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of corruption.
  • Urban legend: A type of modern folklore common in industrialized societies in which stories are passed from person to person (often through e-mail). The original source may or may not be known, and the sender may or may not believe the story to be true. The term was popularized by Jan Harold Brunvand in a series of books, beginning with The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings, in 1981.
  • Vividness criterion: A bias in the evaluation of evidence, in which human thinking and memory is more affected by information that is vivid, concrete, and directly perceived, than by abstract information experienced secondhand (e.g., by reading about it) that may actually have more value and hence should be given greater consideration.
  • War of the Worlds: A radio drama written by Orson Welles, adapted from H. G. Wells's novel of the same name and aired on CBS radio in 1938. The radio show, which tells of a Martian invasion, imitates a series of news bulletins. Many listeners did not realize that they were listening to a fictional program and panicked, believing the invasion to be real.
  • When Prophecy Fails: A book published in 1956 by American psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, demonstrating cases of cognitive dissonance in members of a cult who believed that the world was about to end. When the world did not end on schedule, rather than discard their beliefs, the cult members were reinforced in them.
  • White lie: A lie that is unimportant and told with good intentions, for instance to spare someone's feelings or for the sake of politeness, rather than to maliciously deceive a person.
SarahBoslaugh, Kennesaw State University
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