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

Abstract

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.

A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Conception of Lie

“…The implication of the comments above is that lying requires saying something, rather than implicating something. This is against the previous result by Reins, et al (2021) suggesting that it is still possible to deceive by implicature, even in the perspective of Russian native speakers.…”

“…2008). Reins, et al (2021) find that Russian participants generally judge deceptions to be less morally reprehensible compared to participants from the United Kingdom. Also, the judgements of Russian participants living in a Western country differed sligthly from the judgements of Russians living in Moscow.…”

“…The judgements of Russian respondents living in the United Kingdom resembled judgements of English-speaking respondents from the United Kingdom. Reins, et al (2021) also suggested that these differences were small and the three groups showed similar judgement. This conclusion leads to an assumption that the present experiment would yield in the same results as the original experiment by Coleman and Kay (1981).…”

“…Recent research exploring the evaluation of lying with Russian native speakers as respondents was conducted by Reins, Wiegmann, Marchenko, and Schumski (2021). The researchers investigated four different types of indirect deceptions, presuppositions, GCIs, PCIs, and nonverbal actions with three different groups of respondents: English speaking respondents in the United Kingdom, Russians in Moscow, and Russian living in a Western country.…”

“…After the scenarios, respondents were asked whether each agent in the scenarios had lied and/or misled, and they also needed to evaluate morality of the action. Reins, et al (2021) were interested in the cultural differences between Eastern and Western Europeans. Russian people are described to be more collectivistic, more interdependent, and more holistic, than the Western Europeans (Tower, Kelly andRichards 2011, Varnum, Grossmann, Katunar, Nisbett, andKitayama.…”