Abstract

With the present research, we investigated effects of existential threat on veracity judgments. According to several meta-analyses, people judge potentially deceptive messages of other people as true rather than as false (so-called truth bias). This judgmental bias has been shown to depend on how people weigh the error of judging a true message as a lie (error 1) and the error of judging a lie as a true message (error 2). The weight of these errors has been further shown to be affected by situational variables. Given that research on terror management theory has found evidence that mortality salience (MS) increases the sensitivity toward the compliance of cultural norms, especially when they are of focal attention, we assumed that when the honesty norm is activated, MS affects judgmental error weighing and, consequently, judgmental biases. Specifically, activating the norm of honesty should decrease the weight of error 1 (the error of judging a true message as a lie) and increase the weight of error 2 (the error of judging a lie as a true message) when mortality is salient. In a first study, we found initial evidence for this assumption. Furthermore, the change in error weighing should reduce the truth bias, automatically resulting in better detection accuracy of actual lies and worse accuracy of actual true statements. In two further studies, we manipulated MS and honesty norm activation before participants judged several videos containing actual truths or lies. Results revealed evidence for our prediction. Moreover, in Study 3, the truth bias was increased after MS when group solidarity was previously emphasized.

Highlights

  • As a consequence of the 9/11 terror attacks, President George W

  • As expected, when the importance of honesty was pronounced, percentages of messages judged true were not significantly different from 50% in the mortality salience (MS) condition (M = 51.46%, SD = 9.69), t(39) = 0.95, p = 0.347, whereas a truth bias occurred in the TV control condition (M = 54.90%, SD = 9.62), t(39) = 3.22, p = 0.003

  • These results are in line with our hypotheses, simple effects analyses revealed that percentages of messages judged true in the honesty condition were not significantly lower in the MS condition compared to the TV control condition, F(1,152) = 2.31, p = 0.131

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Summary

Introduction

As a consequence of the 9/11 terror attacks, President George W. In addition to al-Qaeda, this military campaign was targeted toward Saddam Hussein and Iraq because they were assumed by the US government to possess weapons of mass destruction. In their speeches, Secretary of State Colin Powell and President Bush assured the existence of such weapons, leading most Americans to support the war against Iraq (Gallup and Newport, 2004). Investigations of a task force did not substantiate this argument (Duelfer, 2004): no weapons of mass destruction were found.

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