Bluffing

Bluffing can be delineated from lying in general in that bluffing typically involves attempts at making someone believe something that is not true by virtue of displaying false confidence in one's position. This confidence can be either heightened, such as when an individual tries to convince someone of the strength of the individual's position; or deflated, such as when an individual attempts to convince someone of the weakness of the individual's position.

Bluffing often entails the presentation of misinformation vis-à-vis the manipulation of attractive alternatives and/or information. That is, one may obscure the range of behavioral options available to another person by making some options seem more costly or less attractive. For example, a meek woman who is threatened by an attacker may bluff her opponent by standing tall and taking a fighting stance in the hope of prompting her attacker into thinking that the costs are too great to pursue his aggressive behavior.

Another differentiation from lying is that typically the person being bluffed has the (sometimes unknown) advantage of time and/or the ability to “call” the bluff. That is, usually over time, the bluffer's true position is revealed, as in the case of a poker hand. Also, the person being bluffed can always “call” or ask the bluffer to present proof of his or her false assertions and, unlike a lie, this proof is required to maintain the deception. Research on bluffing has focused on four key contexts: (1) interrogations, (2) sports, (3) bargaining or economic settings, and (4) games of chance or skill.

Police officers employ bluffing as an interrogation method in order to convince suspects that the evidence against them is stronger than it actually is. For instance, the police may lie about finding a particular piece of damning evidence or about the results of a forensic test in the hope of convincing the suspect that the evidence against him or her is particularly strong and that denial is futile. This technique is usually combined with falsehoods regarding leniency, should the suspect make a confession. Here, research has shown that bluffing increases the rate of false confessions. For example, in one study, research participants took dictation while in the presence of a confederate. During the dictation, the computer crashed, supposedly because the participants hit the ALT key (something they were informed explicitly not to do because it would result in crashing the computer). When participants were accused of hitting the ALT key in conjunction with having the confederate serve as an erroneous eyewitness, the rate of false confessions nearly doubled to 94 percent, and of those confessions, 55 percent of participants were convinced that they may have [Page 84]actually hit the ALT key. Recently, other research has shown that even more subtle bluffs can result in surprisingly high levels of false confessions. Thus, apparently innocent suspects will admit to a crime, hoping that the false or misrepresented evidence will exonerate them.

In sports, the majority of research has focused on detecting or anticipating movement. Being able to anticipate an opponent's movements can give one a strategic advantage in games such as tennis or soccer. Laboratory and field studies have both shown that novices tend to perform worse at detecting the direction of movement than more experienced players. Research in this context typically uses judgments on kinematic movement; that is, attempting to discern direction of movement using videos or point-light displays. However, knowing that anticipation offers strategic advantage, players will often foreshadow false movements to mislead their opponents into thinking that they are taking a direction that they are not. For example, football players will often make a movement to the left (or right), and then advance in the opposite direction to throw off the defending player. Theoretically, the enhanced ability by experts to detect movement direction should extend toward detecting deceptive movements. Research supporting this hypothesis, however, is mixed and may depend on the sport. Boxing novices outperform experts with fewer false alarms, suggesting that too much expertise resulted in seeing deception that was not there, but expert rugby players were more discriminating of deceptive movements than novices.

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