Researchers from various disciplines—linguistics, law, and philosophy—have long recognized an important distinction between lying and merely misleading, arguing that false explicit content constitutes lying, whereas false implicit content is merely misleading. Recent experimental work has challenged this distinction, showing that a statement conveying false implicit content may be judged as a lie, even if it is explicitly true. This study offers a new challenge: we show that (some forms of) false explicit content can be perceived as merely misleading. Specifically, we examine the effect of deceptively hedging the truth. In Experiment 1, we examine lie judgments for statements, such as, “These birds are sort of extinct” in a context where the birds are extinct and the speaker knows it, comparing them to truthful statements (“These birds are extinct”) and full-fledged lies (“These birds are abundant”)—all preceded by the same story. Results show a significant difference between the different statements, indicating that false explicit content can be perceived as merely misleading. In Experiment 2, we examine whether such statements (e.g., “These birds are sort of extinct”) are consistently perceived as misleading or may also be evaluated as truthful claims/full-fledged lies, depending on the context. Our results show that lie judgments of the same statement were affected by the context. Accordingly, we argue that this evidence further supports the shift away from definitions of lying that rely on a surface linguistic distinction toward accounts grounded in speakers’ commitment, a social-normative construct that better captures the interpersonal nature of lying.
Orr et al. (Wed,) studied this question.