The role of implicit content for lie and truth judgments: A cross-cultural study

Misinformation plays an important role in our lives, be it lies told in everyday conversations or false information spread on social media websites. But when do people consider a statement to be false or an instance of lying, and do these judgements differ between cultures? In the present paper, we shed new light on these questions by examining to what extent implicit content affects judgements of lying and falsity. 3,660 participants from ten countries (Chile, China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, the UK, the US) were presented with deceptive implicatures—i.e. utterances that are literally true but implicitly convey false information—and were then asked whether each speaker lied and whether something true or false was said. Our results show that implicit content plays an important role in people’s judgements, leading certain utterances to be judged as false or lies even when they are explicitly true. Also, the result patterns were strikingly similar across countries.