Truths, Lies, and Equivocations: The Effects of Conflicting Goals on Discourse

This article proposes a situational and discourse-oriented view of a particular class of messages, equivocations, that have usually been dismissed as ineffective or even deceptive. We distinguish between-and measure independently-what a message says (whether it is true or false) and how it is said (whether it is clear or equivocal), and we propose that the nature of the communicative situation determines the position of messages on these two coordinates. Specifically, situations can create external goals or consequences of messages, and these consequences can be positive or negative. There exists a class of situations in which all direct messages (true or false) have negative consequences. We predict that in these avoidance-avoidance conflicts, direct messages will be avoided and indirect, but true, equivocations should occur instead. Using hypothetical scenarios, the first four experiments confirmed that, in such conflicts but not in control conditions, people make their messages equivocal but true. A fifth experiment elicited false messages as well and showed that these could be distinguished from both clear and equivocal truths. Additional analyses showed that equivocations are not lies of omission and that nonverbal leakage did not occur in either equivocal or false messages.

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