Are the Concepts of Truth and Lying Shared Across Cultures?

Lies and falsehoods play an important role in our lives, be they lies told in everyday conversation orfalse information spread on social media websites. But when exactly do people consider a statementto be an instance of lying, or to be false, and do these judgments differ between cultures? In thepresent paper, we shed new light on these questions by examining to what extent implicit contentaffects judgments 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 deceptiveimplicatures—i.e., utterances that are literally true but implicitly convey false information—and werethen asked whether each speaker lied and whether something true or false was said. Our resultsshow that implicit content plays an important role in people’s judgments, leading certain utterancesto be judged as lies or false even when they are explicitly true. Most strikingly, the result patternswere highly similar across countries.