Mind & behavior · 2023
Do a source’s perceived intentions matter when people judge a claim as true?
Even when participants knew exactly how accurate claims were, their truth judgments differed with the intentions they attributed to the source. They more often called claims false when they perceived an intent to deceive rather than inform, and true when they perceived an intent to give an approximate rather than precise account.
Details
Truth is central to science, journalism, law, and many other pillars of modern society. But natural language is imprecise, making it difficult to decide what counts as true even when the is available. The researchers asked how people decide whether a factual claim is true or false.
Across two studies involving 1,181 participants and 16,248 observations, participants saw factual claims alongside the ground truth about them. They classified each claim as true or false.
Although participants knew precisely how accurate the claims were, they classified claims as false more often when they judged the source to be intending to deceive rather than inform its audience. They classified claims as true more often when they judged the source to be intending to provide an approximate rather than a precise account.
The results suggest that people with access to the same facts might disagree about whether claims are true if they attribute different intentions to their sources. The authors suggest the findings may shed light on persistent disagreements over factual claims in the “post-truth era.”
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