Strategic Decievers

A group labeled "strategic deceivers" have a competitive advantage over other people. Researchers at Baylor University created a game giving players the opportunity to bid on an object for which they knew its true value, but the seller did not. Bidders fell into three groups. An honest group offered bids based on the true value, a conservative group made bids only casually related to the true value, while the 10 percent of the participants could be called strategists. They offered low bids when the real price was high and high bids when the price was low. By focusing on credibility, their bids seemed consistent and realistic to the sellers. Even more interesting, MRI's showed the strategists had different brain activity than the others in the regions related to complex decision-making. They made a greater effort to get into the mind of the other player and often bluffed. The people in this group also had above-average IQs.

Stephen Goforth