Honest Behavior: Truth-Seeking, Belief-Speaking, and Fostering Understanding of the Truth in Others

Cooper, Binyamin; Cohen, Taya R.; Huppert, Elizabeth L.; Levine, Emma; Fleeson, William

doi:10.5465/annals.2021.0209

Cited by 16 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 270 publications

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“…For example, honestly communicating threatening or negative information may hurt a partner or strain a relationship. Thus, while it is often implied and assumed that honesty can benefit our relationships, identifying when the costs and benefits of honesty arise can have important implications for health and well-being (Cooper et al, 2023;Le et al, 2022;Levine et al, 2020Levine et al, , 2023Levine & Cohen, 2018).…”

Section: Connections On Well-being and Changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…We focused on a relationship-threatening context in which honesty may be challenging, but necessary: requesting change from a romantic partner. Our work is informed by recent theoretical models positing that honesty is an interpersonal communication process characterized by the intellectual element of sharing the truth and the relational element of communicating in ways that foster an accurate and truthful understanding in others (Cooper et al, 2023;Fritz, 2020). In one of the first studies to our knowledge, we examine the interpersonal nature of honesty using both self-and observer reported measures to test three distinct effects of honesty that emerge between two individuals.…”

Section: Connections On Well-being and Changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, we examine the intrapersonal effects of expressed honesty by an agent requesting change and perceived honesty by their partner, the target receiving a request to change. In addition, we examine the dyadic effects of honesty to understand if a shared perception of honesty must emerge for couple outcomes to be affected, with one person's truthfulness effectively informing and shaping a partner's well-being and behavioral change (Cooper et al, 2023). That is, we examine honest connections-or greater accuracy (congruence) at higher, relative to lower, levels of agent expressed and target perceived honesty-and its effects on well-being and motivating partner change.…”

Section: Connections On Well-being and Changementioning

confidence: 99%

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Expressed and Perceived Honesty Benefits Relationships Even When Couples Are Not Accurate

Le,

Chee,

Shimshock

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Honesty is a virtue that is highly valued across societies, yet can be challenging to enact, especially when truthful expressions may hurt others. We tested preregistered hypotheses on the distinct personal and interpersonal effects of expressed honesty, perceived honesty, and honest connections (i.e., accurate perceptions of expressed honesty) on well-being and change among couples. Romantic partners (N = 214 couples; N = 428) discussed a desired change in the lab and reported on their well-being and motivation to change concurrently and three months later. Honesty and well-being were self-reported and rated by observers, with results indicating correspondence between self and observer reports. Results of multilevel response surface analyses showed that greater expressed and perceived honesty—but not honest connections—predicted greater personal well-being, relationship quality, and target motivation to change concurrently, with some benefits emerging over time. Results could not be explained by couples’ baseline relationship satisfaction, communication styles, or the severity of the issue discussed. Benefits were most observed for self-reported honesty, suggesting that the internal experience and perception of honesty is most consequential for relational outcomes. The current results have important implications for understanding honesty as an interpersonal communication process. We find that honesty can benefit relationships even when the truth may hurt, with more expressed and perceived honesty fostering better relationships regardless of whether couples share in that perception of honesty.

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Section: Connections On Well-being and Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Connections On Well-being and Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Connections On Well-being and Changementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Expressed and Perceived Honesty Benefits Relationships Even When Couples Are Not Accurate

Le,

Chee,

Shimshock

et al. 2024

Preprint

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“…For example, a 19 th century United States citizen's understanding of compassion might have conveniently excluded the treatment of slaves. A commonsense conception of honesty might treat the explicit utterance of falsehoods as much more dishonest than paltering in the sense of intentionally misleading people while uttering statements that are each, strictly speaking, true (Rogers et al, 2017), whereas (arguably) a more ethically correct conception of honesty might treat uttering falsehoods and paltering as similarly dishonest (Cooper et al, 2023). Nevertheless, given the more limited range of reasonable disagreement regarding the application of "compassionate" and "honest" than of "moral", commonsense understandings are likely to be more accurate for the specific concepts of compassion and honesty than for the broader concept of morality.…”

Section: How Should We Determine What Is (Un)compassionate or (Dis)ho...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Prospects and Challenges of Measuring Morality

Sun,

Schwitzgebel

2023

Preprint

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The scientific study of morality requires measurement tools. But can we measure individual differences in something so seemingly subjective, elusive, and difficult to define? This paper will consider the prospects and challenges—both practical and ethical—of measuring how moral a person is. We outline the conceptual requirements for measuring general morality and argue that it would be difficult to operationalize morality in a way that satisfies these requirements. Even if we were able to surmount these conceptual challenges, self-report, informant report, behavioral, and biological measures each have methodological limitations that would substantially undermine their validity or feasibility. These challenges will make it more difficult to develop valid measures of general morality than other psychological traits. But, even if a general measure of morality is not feasible, it does not follow that moral psychological phenomena cannot or should not be measured at all. Instead, there is more promise in developing measures of specific operationalizations of morality (e.g., commonsense morality), specific manifestations of morality (e.g., specific virtues or behaviors), and other aspects of moral functioning that do not necessarily reflect moral goodness (e.g., moral self-perceptions). Still, it is important to be transparent and intellectually humble about what we can and cannot conclude based on various moral assessments—especially given the potential for misuse or misinterpretation of value-laden, contestable, and imperfect measures. Finally, we outline recommendations and future directions for psychological and philosophical inquiry into the development and use of morality measures.

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“…As a consequence, honesty ceases to be a monadic concept used to judge people based on evidence (i.e., a person is either lying or telling the truth based on facts), and instead becomes a dyadic construct, where adherence to truthful information and commitment to personal beliefs coexist as distinct aspects of honesty. This dyadic conceptual model of honesty [9] (see also [14]) involves two components, known as "fact-speaking" and "belief-speaking" [15]. The former refers to actively searching for accurate information and updating one's beliefs based on that information, whereas the latter refers to a person expressing their beliefs, thoughts, and feelings, regardless of whether or not they are accurate.…”

Section: Mainmentioning

confidence: 99%

The 'Truth Contagion' Effect in the US Political Online Debate

Carrella,

Aroyehun,

Lasser

et al. 2023

Preprint

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During the last decade, evidence shows that US politicians’ conception of honesty has undergone a distinct bifurcation, with authentic and sincere but evidence-free "belief-speaking'' becoming more prominent and more differentiated from evidence-based "fact speaking''. Here we examine the downstream consequences of those two ways of conceiving honesty by investigating how users engage with fact-speaking and belief-speaking texts from Democratic and Republican politicians on Twitter. We measured the conceptions of honesty of a sample of tweets and replies using computational text processing, and checked whether the conceptions of honesty in the original tweets aligned with those in their replies. We also measured polarizing language in the replies and examined how it related to the honesty components in the tweets. We found that the conceptions of honesty used in replies aligned with those of the original tweets, suggesting a "contagion'' effect such that politicians determine the tenor of a subsequent conversation involving the public. We also found that belief-speaking tweets were more likely to trigger polarized language in replies, whereas fact-speaking tweets had the opposite effect. Our analysis highlights the crucial role of political leaders in setting the tone of the conversation on social media and it illustrates how evidence-based communication could help decrease audience polarization in online political debate.

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Honest Behavior: Truth-Seeking, Belief-Speaking, and Fostering Understanding of the Truth in Others

Cited by 16 publications

References 270 publications

Expressed and Perceived Honesty Benefits Relationships Even When Couples Are Not Accurate

Expressed and Perceived Honesty Benefits Relationships Even When Couples Are Not Accurate

The Prospects and Challenges of Measuring Morality

The 'Truth Contagion' Effect in the US Political Online Debate

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