Impression Management, Mindshaping and the Social Function of Fibbing

In a symposium focused on deception and counter-deception in machines, one might be immediately drawn to a narrow conception of those phenomena which highlight the pernicious ways in which they might be used. On the broader notion of fibbing that we describe in our talk, the social function of being fast and loose with the truth takes center stage as a tool for accomplishing a wide variety of socially centered goals. We briefly review the FIDE framework, described in (Isaac & Bridewell 2014; Bridewell & Bello 2014), including the conceptual resources it requires and the variety of fib-related concepts it supports. FIDE delineates between the aforementioned concepts as ends, and the strategic means by which the fibber might achieve these ends. In doing so, we show that certain types of difficult to conceptualize behavior, most notably bullshitting (Frankfurt 2006) and responses to bullshitting, are instances of a kind of strategy for impression management that serves higher-order social goals.