Increasing skepticism toward potential liars: effects of existential threat on veracity judgments and the moderating role of honesty norm activation

Abstract

With the present research, we investigated effects of existential threat on veracity judgments. According to several meta-analyses, people judge potentially deceptive messages of other people as true rather than as false (so-called truth bias). This judgmental bias has been shown to depend on how people weigh the error of judging a true message as a lie (error 1) and the error of judging a lie as a true message (error 2). The weight of these errors has been further shown to be affected by situational variables. Given that research on terror management theory has found evidence that mortality salience (MS) increases the sensitivity toward the compliance of cultural norms, especially when they are of focal attention, we assumed that when the honesty norm is activated, MS affects judgmental error weighing and, consequently, judgmental biases. Specifically, activating the norm of honesty should decrease the weight of error 1 (the error of judging a true message as a lie) and increase the weight of error 2 (the error of judging a lie as a true message) when mortality is salient. In a first study, we found initial evidence for this assumption. Furthermore, the change in error weighing should reduce the truth bias, automatically resulting in better detection accuracy of actual lies and worse accuracy of actual true statements. In two further studies, we manipulated MS and honesty norm activation before participants judged several videos containing actual truths or lies. Results revealed evidence for our prediction. Moreover, in Study 3, the truth bias was increased after MS when group solidarity was previously emphasized.

Defending one’s worldviews under mortality salience – Testing the validity of an established idea

“…One further moderator that might explain the null findings in the present studies refers to the idea that MS reactions depend on the social norms and on values that are momentarily salient (Jonas et al, 2008;Schindler et al, 2013Schindler et al, , 2019bSchindler & Reinhard, 2015a, 2015b). Accordingly, it has been found that devaluation of opposing others under MS was buffered when tolerance was previously activated (Greenberg et al, 1992;Vail et al, 2019).…”

Can Ordinary People Detect Deception After All?

“…Another study contrasted the effect of mortality salience in combination with messages stressing the importance of honesty versus the importance of group solidarity (thus increasing the costs of signaling distrust). Lie detection was worse than when the death cue was paired with messages about group solidarity (34%) as opposed to honesty (48%) [52].…”

The Dark Triad and Deception Perceptions

“…According to a foundational meta-analysis, humans are slightly better than chance at detecting deception (Bond and DePaulo, 2006). Moreover, humans tend to be truth-biased in their response, that is, they assume that others are truthful independently of their actual truth status (Levine et al, 1999) and more variance is found in response bias than in deception detection accuracy (Bond and DePaulo, 2008; Schindler and Reinhard, 2015). The almost chance converging deception detection performance might be explained by the low availability of behavioral cues to deception (Hartwig and Bond, 2011).…”