Lecture by Dr. Shirly Orr

A joint work by Dr. Shirly Orr, Prof. Edmundo Kronmüller from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Prof. Einat Shetreet:

Truth in Context: A step closer to understanding the ordinary concept of lying

(Delivered at ISCOP 2025)

Abstract:

Researchers from various disciplines—law, linguistics, philosophy—have long recognized an important distinction between lying and merely misleading. The traditional claim has been that lying is restricted to false explicit content, while false implicit content is merely misleading. Recent experimental work challenges this distinction. This work indicates that people sometimes consider an explicitly true statement a full-fledged lie, when its implicit content is false. The current study adds another challenge to the traditional view, showing that false explicit content can sometimes be perceived as merely misleading. We conducted two experiments to investigate this.
In Experiment 1 (N=64), participants read a story stating that Snurf birds are extinct. The story was followed by one of three different statements: a true-control (“Snurf birds are extinct”), a falsecontrol (“Snurf birds exist”), or an experimental target (“Snurf birds are sort of extinct”).
In Experiment 2 (N=60), the experimental targets from Experiment 1 were preceded by three different contexts: the original story from Experiment 1, a context rendering the statement true (where Snurf birds are very rare; Control-true), or false (where Snurf birds are abundant; Controlfalse).
In both experiments, we measured participants’ lie-, trust-, and morality- judgments. In both experiments, lie judgments consistently differed between misleading claims and their true/false counterparts (ps0.82). Our results, thus, show that false explicit content may be seen as merely misleading. Moreover, they reveal a complex item-specific pattern that emphasizes the dominance of context alongside explicitness.

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