Influencing Choices by Changing Beliefs: A Logical Theory of Influence, Persuasion, and Deception

Abstract

We model persuasion, viewed as a deliberate action through which an agent (persuader) changes the beliefs of another agent's (persuadee). This notion of persuasion paves the way to express the idea of persuasive influence, namely inducing a change in the choices of the persuadee by changing her beliefs. It allows in turns to express different aspects of deception. To this end, we propose a logical framework that enables expressing actions and capabilities of agents, their mental states (desires, knowledge and beliefs), a variety of agency operators as well as the connection between mental states and choices. Those notions, once combined, enable us to capture, the notion of influence, persuasion and deception, as well as their relation.

Reasoning about manipulation in multi-agent systems

“…when an agent asks a question, or apologize, or publicly commit himself to do something, etc. Our notion of persuasion is syntactically close to the one proposed by Bonnet et al (2021) -deliberately seeing to it that the persuadee believes something -except we do not consider a temporal modality. Our notion of deception is however different as we explicitly consider concealment, which is not the case in Bonnet et al (2021).…”

“…Those three related concepts has been modeled by (Bonnet, Leturc, Lorini, & Sartor, 2021;Sakama et al, 2015;Van Ditmarsch et al, 2012). All those approaches are based of the fact that an agent i informs another agent j about something so that j believes it while the agent i believes the opposite.…”

“…For instance, Sakama et al (2015) use modal logic and introduces a modality of communication between two agents, a modality of belief as well as a modality of intention to describe concepts such as lying, churning, concealment or deception. Bonnet et al (2021) define persuasion as a deliberate action through which a persuader changes the beliefs of a persuadee, and define deception as persuading the persuadee of something under the assumption that the persuader believes that it is false. finally, Van Ditmarsch et al (2012) uses dynamic doxastic logics with a modality to describe the action of private advertisements that is used to describe lying.…”

“…This notion of deception is then refined to express more subtle notions, such as smooth-talking (persuading since the persuader is uncertain whether ϕ is true or false) which is equivalent to Sakama et al (2015)'s "bullshitting". Bonnet et al (2021) distinguish benevolent, malevolent and reckless deception, which differ in how persuading an agent j of something is good for j (or not). In the malevolent form, the deceiver believes that believing ϕ will have bad consequences for the deceived.…”

“…While Bonnet et al (2021) and Sakama et al (2015) consider predicates to express lying, deception, or persuasion, another approach Van Ditmarsch et al ( 2012) gets rid of representing those notions through predicates. Instead, they consider lying as a public announcement which is false, and they use a dynamic doxastic logic to describe the effects of lying through the semantics of the logical system.…”