The impact of implicit content on lie and truth judgments: A cross-culture study

In recent years, several empirical studies were conducted to investigate whether people think it’s possible to lie with deceptive implicatures (Antomo, Müller, Paul, Paluch & Thalmann, 2018; Weissman & Terkourafi, 2018; Reins & Wiegmann, 2021; Wiegmann, Willemsen & Meibauer, 2021). While the findings are not clear cut, there is quite strong evidence that at least some cases of deceptive implicatures are considered to be lies. Moreover, Orr, Ariel and Peleg (2017) found that some literally true utterances that conveyed a false implicature were judged to be false, suggesting that sometimes the implicit rather than explicit content forms the basis on which people evaluate the truth or falsity of an utterance. In the present project, we investigate whether the aforementioned phenomena can be generalized to different languages and cultures. To this aim, we will conduct a cross-cultural study in which participants are presented with cases of deceptive implicatures and asked to judge whether each speaker lied and whether what the speaker said was true or false. Participants will be recruited in Chile, Mexico, Spain, Germany, Israel, South Africa, UK, USA, China and Japan.