There are many times that you may be confronted with a situation that you like to instantly discover if someone is trying to deceive you. Is there a way to know for certain? Well, it turns out that there is indeed a technique you can use to know if someone is bluffing.

The Scenario

Let's walk through an example. Suppose you are playing Risk. You and your opponent have ended up sharing a continent. Your opponent wants to get rid of you and conquer the entire continent. He starts to threaten you and tells you that if you don't remove your armies yourself he will attack you and kill all your armies. You have a sizable army there, so he has to make a serious decision before he invades. If he invades, it will cost you but it will also cost him. You want to know if he is bluffing about the invasion. Although you don't want to leave, but if he is genuinely going to attack you, you may want to consider giving up and moving elsewhere. At least you have another chance to survive. Of course if he invades and you choose to stay, he will weaken himself as well. Hence, he has an incentive to bluff his invasion. The question is, how would you know if he is bluffing?

Analysis

All bluffers have one thing in common. They are all trying to provide a false impression of themselves. It turns out that bluffers, in their attempt to disguise their true intention, overcompensate the false impression. If you look for this, you can easily call their bluff.

Here is how it works in this example. If your opponent makes statements such as, "This continent is mine, if you don't move I will invade you until the last man is killed", "I don't care about myself, I just have to get this continent and it is mine anyway. You should just leave", "You have got nothing to gain if you stay. It would be a stupid move on your behalf", "Only newbies stay and fight".

In this case, your opponent is bluffing. A bluffer always tries to show himself as a confident player who knows it all. He creates a sense that he doesn't care when he does and vice versa. In doing so, he may easily overcompensate his actions. That's how you spot the bluffer. A bluffer doesn't really want to invade you. He just wants to scare you enough, so that you leave. Deep down, he is quite concerned if he has to attack you and potentially lose armies. As a result, if he feels that you are calling his bluff, he gets upset and angry. Now he has no choice but to invade you and that’s not what he wanted to do in the first place. His bluffing attitude therefore pushes him to overcompensate his invasion threat. In short, if your opponent appears to be strongly committed to his cause, no matter what, he is probably bluffing.

A player who is forced to invade you and is not bluffing will be unhappy about the implications of his decision and will let you know about it. His attitude is completely different from a bluffer. He appears upset. He has no reason to tell you continuously that his invasion will be disastrous to you. He knows that you are aware of this and understands his potential power in destroying you. He doesn't have to tell you how confident he is. It is the insecure person who wants to tell everyone how confident he is.

International Politics

You can use the same technique to discover the bluffers on the stage of international politics. Those who continuously complain and threaten invasions or penalties are likely to be bluffing. Undertaking an invasion or imposing a sanction on other countries does not come without a cost. It takes effort. If the sanction imposer appears to be very vocal and continuously declares that they would do anything they can to enforce their will on the other country, the chances are that they are bluffing. The bluffing nation usually exaggerates the implications of its decision (sanctions, invasion, etc.) to show that it really means it. In reality, it is no more than rhetoric.

If a nation was not bluffing, it may not care how confident it appears to others. After all, if they are going to invade or sanction the other nation, they will not worry too much if others are not going to believe them. They are going to do it anyway. In fact they will be focused more on the cost of the operations and its implications than to worry if their threatening message is getting through.

Conclusion

To spot a bluffer, all you need to do is to see if he is overcompensating his actions and attitude. A bluffer is eager to show you that what he says is indeed what he is going to do and in the process he ends up exaggerating.