Trust, Deception, and Deepfakes

This unit examines how cognitive biases and perceptual mechanisms make people and organizations vulnerable to deepfakes and other deceptive media, and surveys how those deceptions succeed and fail in real-world contexts. Students will analyze trust dynamics, evaluate detection challenges through case studies and experiments, and develop practical communication and ethical response strategies to reduce risk and prepare for technical mitigation in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze cognitive biases and perception heuristics (the trust bias and related phenomena) that increase susceptibility to visual and audio deception in business contexts.
• Evaluate the technical and situational indicators of deepfakes by critiquing real-world failure cases and identifying common weaknesses in detection approaches.
• Design and conduct a controlled experiment to measure susceptibility to deepfakes, analyze collected data, and draw evidence-based conclusions about factors that influence deception.
• Apply ethical decision-making and communication strategies to create organizational response protocols (including refusal strategies and balancing transparency) that mitigate the business risks of deceptive media.