This is a special post for quick takes by Linch. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I've enjoyed playing social deduction games (mafia, werewolf, among us, avalon, blood on the clock tower, etc) for most of my adult life. I've become decent but never great at any of them. A couple of years ago, I wrote some comments on what I thought the biggest similarities and differences between social deduction games and incidences of deception in real life is. But recently, I decided that what I wrote before aren't that important relative to what I now think of as the biggest difference:
> If you are known as a good liar, is it generally advantageous or disadvantageous for you?
In social deduction games, the answer is almost always "no." Being a good liar is often advantageous, but if you are known as a good liar, this is almost always bad for you. People (rightfully) don't trust what you say, you're seen as an unreliable ally, etc. In games with more than two sides (e.g. Diplomacy), being a good liar is seen as a structural advantage for you, so other people are more likely to gang up on you early.
Put another way, if you have the choice of being a good liar and being seen as a great liar, or being a great liar and seen as a good liar, it's almost always advantageous for you to be the latter. Indeed, in many games it's actually better to be a good liar who's seen as a bad liar, than to be a great liar who's seen as a great liar.
In real life, the answer is much more mixed. Sometimes, part of being a good liar means never seeming like a good liar ("the best salesmen never makes you feel like they're a salesman").
But frequently, being seen as a good liar is an asset than a liability. Thinking of people like Musk and Altman here, and also the more mundane examples of sociopaths and con men ("he's a bastard, but he's our bastard"). It's often more advantageous to be seen as a good liar, than to actually be a good liar.
This is (partially) because real life has many more repeated games of coordination, and people want allies (and don't want enemies) who are capable. In comparison, individual board games are much more isolated and people are objectively more similar playing fields.
Generalizing further from direct deception, a history blog post once posed the following question: Q: Is it better to have a mediocre army and a great reputation for fighting, or a great army with a mediocre reputation?
Answer: The former is better, pretty much every time.
Having read more Schelling on influence and Singh on coups, I think I have an additional model here: in most common games, whether someone's seen as a good liar or not is primarily epistemic, for boundedly rational agents (it's a Bayesian adjustment on how much I can trust my assessments of your accuracy). The earlier irl analogy of a used car salesman that doesn't make you feel like a salesman is analogous (the purpose of their deception is getting under your deception radar so you see them as trustworthy in an epistemic game).
I agree being high-integrity and not lying is a good strategy in many real-world dealings. It's also better for your soul. However I will not frame it as "being a bad liar" so much as "being honest." Being high-integrity is often valuable, and ofc you accrue more benefits from actually being high-integrity when you're also known as high-integrity. But these benefits mostly come from actually not lying, rather than lying and being bad at it.
4Seth Herd
Right. There's no advantage to being a bad liar, but there may be an advantage to being seen as a bad liar. But it's probably not worth lying badly to get that reputation, since that would also wreck your reputation for honesty.