Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers

• Published in: Review of philosophy and psychology 2023-06, Vol.14 (2), p.735-762
• Main Authors: Reins, Louisa M., Wiegmann, Alex, Marchenko, Olga P., Schumski, Irina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Developmental Psychology; Education; Epistemology; Neurosciences; Philosophy; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy of Science
• ISSN: 1878-5158; 1878-5166
• DOI: 10.1007/s13164-021-00587-w

The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to say something 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 of N  = 255 participants from Russia and N  = 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 agent saying something they believe to be false.