Dissecting deceptive patterns in nature and technology

Learning to spot the patterns.

Published in

UX Collective

10 min readApr 12, 2023

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.”
Palahniuk (1999, p. 82)

A quick thought exercise

What connects the following cases of deception?

In 2012, a new species of spider (Cyclosa tremula) was discovered that uses debris from captured prey to construct a larger simulacrum of itself at the centre of its web. The spider can vibrate its web to make the simulacrum move, thereby performing a rudimentary form of puppetry (Drake, 2012; Torres, 2012).
In March 1862, in the face of an imminent attack by Unionist forces, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston strategically placed logs painted black to resemble cannons around his fieldworks in Centreville, Virginia. The apparent defence of the works was sufficient to hold off Unionist forces, allowing Johnston’s men to withdraw to the Rappahannock River (Mills & Mills, 2008, p. 108).
In 1999, during Operation Allied Force, the Serbian military fooled Coalition aircraft into attacking plywood and canvas targets. The Serbs constructed false bridges from scrap metal to protect real bridges. Telephone poles and old truck wheels simulated artillery pieces. Milk crates mimicked anti-aircraft missile launchers. And wooden MiG-29 aircraft decoys were used to protect real fighter aircraft (RTO Task Group SCI-131/RTG-028, 2008).
Drug dealers regularly cut their products with cheaper materials, such as the anaesthetic benzocaine, to bulk up the expensive chemicals involved. These cutting agents mimic the more expensive chemicals’ look, texture and taste (Cole et al., 2010; The Telegraph, 2016).
In 2009, the hacking group 4Chan created automated voting software that bypassed human authentication processes and voted their founder to become Time Person of the Year on the Time Inc website. They also gamed the order of the first 21 individuals listed in the poll so that the first letter of their first names spelt out the message “marble cake also the game”, a reference to one of their online discussion fora (Lamere, 2009).
The website crowdsondemand.com will, for a fee, provide sizeable and specialised crowds to support “protests, rallies, advocacy, audiences, PR stunts and political events.” (crowdsondemand.com, 2023).
And in the 1990 film, ‘Home Alone’, eight-year-old Kevin defends his home against burglars by creating the illusion that a party is in full swing at his house. He animates manikins via ropes attached to their limbs. He attaches life-size cardboard cutouts of people to a toy train that revolves around its track. And he uses backlighting to create animated silhouettes resembling party guests at the house’s windows (Hughes & Columbus, 1990).

Spotting patterns

One of my early deception research studies investigated what the military could learn from deceptive practices in other domains. The study reviewed deception in fields such as magic and conjuring, animal deception, advertising and marketing, the psychic industry, scams and confidence tricks, politics, and historical cases of military deception. Later work reviewed a significantly broader span of domains.

On first consideration, cases of deception drawn from such diverse domains appear to differ from one another widely. However, as the study progressed, I was struck repeatedly by a strong sense of déjà vu — features within a given case of deception frequently mirrored features of other cases drawn from entirely unrelated domains.

For example, I was struck by how:

A Plover simulating a broken wing to lure a fox away from its ground-nesting chicks had commonalities with the WWII Starfish decoys that lured enemy bombers away from dropping bombs on densely populated UK cities.
A software worm that recorded and later played-back centrifuge data while it span the devices out-of-control causing them to explode, used the same strategies underpinning a card trick that simulates precognition of a spectator’s future choices.
And Zodariidae spiders that mimic the look, behaviour and chemical properties of ants so that they can live amongst them while preying on them reflected strategies used by undercover police officers who infiltrate and collect evidence from inside a criminal organisation.

Noticing such patterns gave rise to a raft of valuable lines of enquiry and follow-on research studies.

Learning from patterns

“Trends, reoccurring events and circumstances. These are common ways we see patterns. Patterns are the laws of nature and life that present themselves in all disciplines of life — from the smallest microorganism to macrocosm. They manage the systems by which our universe operates. While patterns aren’t always apparent, they are continuous and autonomous.”
TEDxVCU (2017)

Whenever I came across a new pattern, I would record it and give it a label, such as “attract the target’s attention”, “simulate behaviour”, “swap the real for the false”, etc. As I gathered additional data on a common pattern from across a range of other sources, I began to understand better how it worked and often refined and improved its label.

I noticed that specific patterns tended to occur near the start of a case of deception to manipulate a subset of psychological processes, such as affecting where the target was looking. Other patterns occurred later in the case and manipulated a different subset of processes — for example, leading the target to formulate incorrect expectations.

These natural strategy groupings led me to construct a model of the psychological processes (and, for non-human cases of deception, the analogues of these processes) that deception targets and manipulates to achieve its effects.

Over time, it became clear that distinct classes of strategies exist to manipulate:

Where a target looks (or attends with their other sensory systems).
What a target sees (or hears, smells, tastes, feels, etc.).
What a target thinks is happening and decides to do about it.
What a target’s expectations are about the future.
How a target feels about the current and anticipated future situation.
The behaviour a target exhibits as a result of these prior processes.

The various patterns within these strategies can help deconstruct and explain other cases of deception. Some additional uses of these deception patterns are now discussed.

Exploiting patterns

“The way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful if one follows patterns.”
Seneca (65AD/1917, Letter 6, On Sharing Knowledge)

My analysis of the strategies used in different cases of deception led to a generic model of the critical processes that any target (be it animal, human, organisation, software algorithm or machine learning, etc.) uses to make sense of the world and generate action. The model was named the ‘Six Block Model’ due to its six primary components. And while the model was not specific to deception, it provided a structure for understanding the basis on which all deception operates.

Accompanying the model was a table of generic deception strategies (referred to as ‘Deception Gambits’) for targeting and manipulating these different processes.

Initially, the model and strategies helped me to deconstruct and classify different cases of deception and enabled me to see the commonalities and differences between them. I soon found myself viewing deception as an entirely generic phenomenon that transcends domain, target type, target scale, and any intervening technologies.

In addition to supporting the analysis of a case of deception, it soon became apparent that the strategies could also be used by practitioners to help design deceptive action (i.e., by applying a pattern lifted from another domain to their current problem set) and to help counterdeception practitioners identify and unpack the deceptive strategies used against them by adversaries.

By noticing, capturing, and packaging patterns, I found I could:

Recognise and understand deceptive strategies when I saw them, thereby enabling analysis, deconstruction and learning about a historical case of deception.
Better spot and recognise others’ use of deception, thereby establishing a basis for a system for counter-deception.
Design deceptive action by using the strategies as underlying building blocks.
Reuse past deception patterns to accelerate the design of new deceptive actions.
Use the associated pattern language as a simple and consistent way to communicate thinking about deception with others.
Graphically map and mark up the components of a retrospective or prospective case of deception based on the pattern language. The resulting representation could then support analytics and the development of shared understanding within a planning team.
Repeatedly use the components of the resultant model as a simple yet powerful structure for a host of other processes, including Planning, Target Audience Analysis, Measurement of Effect, etc.

How might such pattern-based insights be used to enhance your professional practice?

Finding patterns in your professional practice

“Finding patterns is the essence of wisdom.”
Dennis Prager, US radio talk show host.

Patterns underpin and guide professional practice in many different domains, including software development (Gamma, 1995), architecture (Chelliah et al., 2017), urban planning (Alexander et al., 1977), biology (Alon, 2006), knitting (Atherley, 2015), and music composition (Schlechte, 2019), etc. It is perhaps no surprise that patterns are also central to the professional practices of deception and counterdeception.

If you are keen to discover and exploit your own deceptive patterns (the novelty of which may be fundamental to creating competitive advantage), you might wish to consider the following activities:

Spot and collect deceptive patterns outside your primary domain of interest. For example, make a point of studying practices in fields such as animal deception (Stevens, 2016), marketing and advertising (Boush et al., 2009), cyberspace (Malin et al., 2017), art forgery (Hebborn, 2004), or military deception (Rothstein & Whaley, 2013), etc. How could you lift and use these patterns in your domain of practice?
Spot, collect, and catalogue deceptive patterns in the world around you. For example, make a point of looking out for deception next time you visit a supermarket, watch an interview with a politician, see special effects employed in a film, are surprised by a major twist in a work of fiction, spot unusual patterning on an animal, or observe somebody wearing makeup, etc.
Watch a series like The Real Hustle or films like The Sting, Catch Me If You Can, Catfish, Matchstick Men, or American Hustle, and spot patterns in the strategies used in the different confidence tricks portrayed.
Read some beginner’s books on magic (e.g. Pogue, 1998), and practice tricks on your friends and family. Consider the relationship between theory and practice and how this relationship works in other domains. Explore how the principles and strategies of magic might help explain deceptive strategies used in other domains.
For each case of deception that you encounter, think about the following:

Who or what is the target?
What psychological processes are being manipulated to facilitate the deception?
How are these processes manipulated?
What outcome does this achieve?
How could these principles be applied in your professional practice?
And how might these patterns help you spot and counter deception if used against you?

We encounter a vast variety of deceptive patterns every day. If you keep your eyes (and your mind) open, with practice, such patterns become significantly easier to spot. And with work, these patterns can almost always be captured and reused in various ways in other settings.

The Thought Exercise revisited

Concerning the Thought Exercise at the start of this article, all the cases cited involve frugal simulation of inflated mass. In each case, the deceiver attempts to inflate their apparent size or presence using materials that are cheaper than the real thing but that simulate it credibly to the target.

References

Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., & Silverstein, M. (1977). A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Alon, U. (2006). An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits: Chapman and Hall/CRC.

Atherley, K. (2015). The Beginner’s Guide to Writing Knitting Patterns: Learn to Write Patterns Others Can Knit. Blue Ash, OH: Interweave Press.

Boush, D. M., Friestad, M., & Wright, P. (2009). Deception In The Marketplace: The Psychology Of Deceptive Persuasion and Consumer Self-protection. New York: Routledge.

Chelliah, P. R., Subramanian, H., & Murali, A. (2017). Architectural Patterns: Uncover Essential Patterns in the Most Indispensable Realm of Enterprise Architecture: Packt Publishing Ltd.

Cole, C., Jones, L., McVeigh, J., Kicman, A., Syed, Q., & Bellis, M. A. (2010). Cut: A Guide to the Adulterants, Bulking Agents and Other Contaminants Found in Illicit Drugs. Liverpool: Centre for Public Health, Faculty of Health and Applied Social Sciences, John Moores University.

Hughes, J. (Writer) & C. Columbus (Director). (1990). Home Alone. United States: 20th Century Fox.

crowdsondemand.com. (2023). Your home for protests, rallies, advocacy, audiences, PR stunts and political events. Retrieved 09/12/2019 from https://crowdsondemand.com

Drake, N. (2012). Spider That Builds Its Own Spider Decoys Discovered. wired.com. Retrieved 04/04/2023 from https://www.wired.com/2012/12/spider-building-spider/

Gamma, E. (1995). Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Hebborn, E. (2004). The Art Forger’s Handbook. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press.

Lamere, P. (2009). Inside the Precision Hack. Retrieved 04/04/2023 from https://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-hack/

Malin, C. H., Gudaitis, T., Holt, T. J., & Kilget, M. (2017). Deception in the Digital Age: Exploiting and Defending Human Targets Through Computer-Mediated Communications. London: Academic Press.

Mills, C. A., & Mills, A. L. (2008). Alexandria, 1861–1865. Mt. Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing.

Palahniuk, C. (1999). Survivor: A Novel. New York: Norton.

Pogue, D. (1998). Magic For Dummies. Foster City, CA: IDG Books.

Rothstein, H., & Whaley, B. (2013). The Art and Science of Military Deception. Massachusetts, USA: Artech House.

RTO Task Group SCI-131/RTG-028. (2008). Military Impact of Future Denial and Deception. (RTO Technical Report TR-SCI-131). NATO.

Schlechte, T. (2019). A Pattern Language For Composing Music. Pike Falls, Vermont: PfCM Press.

Seneca, L. A. (65AD/1917). Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales (R. M. Gummere, Trans.). London: W. Heinemann

Stevens, M. (2016). Cheats and Deceits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

TEDxVCU. (2017). Stated theme for the TEDx conference, held at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA., February 25th 2017.

The Telegraph. (2016). Chemicals dealer ‘sold more benzocaine to cocaine gang than GlaxoSmithKlein uses in a year’. Retrieved 04/04/2023 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/12171829/Chemicals-dealer-sold-more-benzocaine-to-cocaine-gang-than-GlaxoSmithKlein-uses-in-a-year.html

Torres, P. (2012). New Species of ‘Decoy’ Spider Likely Discovered At Tambopata Research Center. Retrieved 04/04/2023 from https://www.rainforestexpeditions.com/new-species-of-decoy-spider-likely-discovered-at-tambopata-research-center/