Are the concepts of truth and lying shared across cultures?

Lies and falsehoods play an important role in our lives, be they lies told in everyday conversation or false information spread on social media websites. But when exactly do people consider a statement to be an instance of lying, or to be false, and do these judgments differ between cultures? In the present article, we shed new light on these questions by examining to what extent implicit content affects judgments of lying and falsity. Three thousand six hundred sixty participants from 10 countries (Chile, China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States) were presented with deceptive implicatures-that is, utterances that are literally true but implicitly convey false information-and were then asked whether each speaker lied and whether something true or false was said. Our results show that implicit content plays an important role in people's judgments, leading certain utterances to be judged as lies or false even when they are explicitly true. Most strikingly, the result patterns were highly similar across countries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).