The Artifice System is built around a universal framework called the Six Block Model. This framework comprises a succinct representation of six core psychological processes that all humans, irrespective of culture, use to make sense of the world and generate purposeful action. The 6BM provides the actionable structure for developing your deceptive thinking skills.

In reality, all these processes operate simultaneously in one complex activity for making sense of the world and generating action, i.e. ‘thinking’. So while the 6BM represents a convenient fiction - while it is not ‘true’ - it still has significant utility and provides a firm foundation for applying creativity and systematic rigour to thinking about deception in an adversarial context.

For our purposes, the processes portrayed in the model are treated as acting interdependently. Attention steers perception, perception feeds sensemaking, sensemaking generates expectations and emotions (that in turn shape other processes), and sensemaking also drives behaviour.

Each process represents an attack surface that can be targeted and manipulated independently to achieve different kinds of effect on the target’s thinking and behaviour. However, manipulating interdependent processes is reliant on manipulating preceding processes, i.e. later processes can only be shaped by controlling the earlier processes that impact on them – for example, a target’s sensemaking can only be interfered with by first controlling the target’s attention, and then shaping its perception.

The blocks within the 6BM are scalable – that is, each individual psychological attack surface has an analogue that exists at group and organisational levels. The strategies used for manipulating the psychological building blocks are the same, irrespective of the level at which they are applied. The figure below shows how each building block scales to an organisational level.

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Specific applications of the Six Block Model

The 6BM can:

• be used to help systematic thinking about different kinds of deception activities, and the effects they achieve
• provide a structure for analysing a target and discovering opportunities for deceiving them
• support the representation and analysis of retrospective or prospective cases of deceptive action.

• provide a flexible and universal structure for working through the key considerations that are required for thinking up deception activity that works in an adversarial context
• provide a conceptual backdrop to help you sort and sanity check your different ideas for fooling a target
• support the conception of measures to determine the effectiveness of your deception course of action
• support a counter-deception critiquing process that helps you learn from the deceptions used by others.

Gambit: a device or action, typically one entailing a degree of risk, that is calculated to gain an advantage

The term ‘gambit’ is used as all deception involves risk, and relying on a deceptive strategy where the adversary 'gets a choice' can increase risk relative to alternative strategies that seek to remove choices from them.

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