Abstract
I investigate: (1) to what extent do folk ascriptions of lying differ between casual and courtroom contexts? (2) to what extent does motive (reason) to lie influence ascriptions of trust, mental states, and lying judgments? (3) to what extent are lying judgments consistent with previous ascriptions of communicated content? Following the Supreme Court’s Bronston judgment, I expect: (1) averaged lying judgments to be similar in casual and courtroom contexts; (2) motive to lie to influence levels of trust, mental states ascriptions, and patterns of lying judgments; (3) retrospective judgments of lying, after being presented with the state of the world, to be inconsistent with previous judgments of communicated content: participants hold the protagonist responsible for content she did not communicate. I performed a survey experiment on the Qualtrics platform. Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 630). I employed standard Likert scales and forced-choice questions. I found that: (1) average lying judgments are similar in casual and courtroom contexts; (2) motive to lie decreases trust ascription and increases lying judgment; (3) judgments of lying are inconsistent with previous judgments of communicated content: participants hold the protagonist responsible for content they did not communicate (effect size of the difference d = .69). Perjury ascriptions are inconsistent. The Supreme Court’s worries expressed in the Bronston judgment are well founded. This article helps reforming jury instructions in perjury cases.
Highlights
Samuel Bronston, the owner of Samuel Bronston Productions based in New York, made movies in various European countries to lower the movie production costs
Each participant had to answer a question on ex ante probability of all objects having the relevant property on a slider scale ranging from 0 to 100: Thereafter, participants were presented with the exact same utterance but were split into three groups
This result means that there was no risk that participants would later confound in the answers on ex post probability a belief in the speaker’s words with a prior belief that there is very little chance that all objects would have the relevant property
Summary
Samuel Bronston, the owner of Samuel Bronston Productions based in New York, made movies in various European countries to lower the movie production costs. As discovered later, he kept bank accounts in 37 different countries. In 1964, after one of the company’s big movie productions, The Fall of the Roman Empire, proved a financial catastrophe, Bronston filed for federal bankruptcy protection. Bronston was questioned under oath about his offshore bank accounts by a lawyer representing his creditors. Do you have any bank accounts in Swiss banks, Mr Bronston? Q. Have you any nominees who have bank accounts in Swiss banks?
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