COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	ON THE USEFULNESS OF HYPOCRISY AND PRETENSE
C00005 ENDMK
C⊗;
ON THE USEFULNESS OF HYPOCRISY AND PRETENSE


	Our thesis is that relationships between people often
depend - %2for perfectly good reasons%1 - on concealment, pretense
and even hypocrisy.  The reasons are not psychological or
sociological but rather game-theoretic.  They would apply (given
certain mild assumptions) to relations among robots or to relations
between robots and people.

	For example, suppose that ⊗A and ⊗B are a man and a woman
getting acquainted.  Supppose that ⊗A happens to think of ⊗B 
as a possible marriage partner but isn't sure and begins to evaluate
each successive action of ⊗B from that point of view.  As long
as ⊗A keeps these thoughts to himself (to impute a definite sex to ⊗A), 
there is no problem, and the process of getting acquainted can proceed
just as though the marriage evaluation were not taking place.
However, if ⊗B were not only aware of the evaluation but new how
each successive event in the relationship affected it, then ⊗B 
would have to consider the effect of each individual action
on the evaluation.  This would tend to spoil the relationship.

	It might be supposed that this is simply a matter of
the human capability of embarassment - a psychological defect
of us humans.  However, I claim that it would also apply to
robots or computer programs - just so long as they had goals
and hopes about each others evaluations of themselves.  Namely,