Abstract
AbstractThe present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent tosaysomething they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample ofN = 255 participants from Russia andN = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our findings show a strong degree of similarity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agentsayingsomething they believe to be false.
Highlights
The practices of lying and deceiving constitute an important aspect of human communication that can be observed in virtually all societies and cultures
In a multilevel model taking participants into account as a random factor, we predicted participants’ lie ratings from sample (Russian participants living in Moscow (= Russia I) vs. Russian participants living in a Western country (= Russia II)), category of deception, and the interaction of the two factors
The analyses revealed that participants’ lie ratings in the sample of Russian participants living in Moscow significantly differed from participants’ lie ratings in the UK comparison sample, whereas participants’ lie ratings in the sample of Russians living in a Western
Summary
The practices of lying and deceiving constitute an important aspect of human communication that can be observed in virtually all societies and cultures. There is an extensive body of theoretical and empirical work on questions that concern lying, only few empirical studies have investigated people’s. Concept of lying (i.e., how people use and understand the term lying) and whether this concept differs across cultures. Lying is a classic and currently prominent topic in philosophy. According to the predominant view in the philosophical literature, lying entails that speakers assert something they believe to be false. This requirement may be spelled out as follows (cf Stokke 2018; Viebahn 2019):
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