From the last post we could get the idea that Americans are absolutely devoted to truth, which could make us feel smug compared to the “truth-relative” Chinese. Before we get too certain about that, let's look at some evidence that points otherwise.

Back in 1981, Linda Coleman and Paul Kay, a graduate student and a linguistics professor, wrote a paper about the English word lie (Linda Coleman and Paul Kay, “Prototype Semantics: The English Word Lie,” Language, vol. 57, no. 1, Mar. 1981, pp. 26-44). They were curious about whether some lies are “better” than others, and, if so, what makes one lie more of a lie than another. They realized that there are plenty of cases where a person doesn't tell the truth, but which we wouldn't call “lies.” Sometimes we say things that aren't true because we don't know they're false: I might honestly believe that Tom said he'd get here at 8:00, even though he actually said 9:00, and I either misheard him or misremembered. We wouldn't call that a lie. Same goes for my saying, “I'm so hungry I could eat a wagon wheel”: we wouldn't call this a lie because I don't intend to deceive you. The “best” lies should involve all three: the speaker says something false, knows it's false but says it anyway, and is deliberately deceiving me.

Coleman and Kay ran an experiment, asking native speakers of English to read eight scenarios and evaluate each one for how “good” a lie it was. Sure enough, the “best” lies involved factual falsity, knowledge of falsity, and intent to deceive. The “worst” involved none, and the rest fell in between.

The big surprise in the study was that, when they ran statistics to see which of the three mattered most, factual falsity came in last. The speaker's belief that something was false, and their intent to deceive, were stronger indicators of “lies” that actual falsity. So much for the idea that a lie is just a “false statement.”

Six years later, in 1987, Eve Sweetser, another linguist, explained Coleman and Kay's results: factual falsity only matters to people because information is valuable, and because trust matters: for human communication to work, we need to be able to trust that others are generally going to tell us things that they believe are true and that are actually true. (Eve Sweetser, “The definition of lie: an examination of the folk models underlying a semantic prototype,” in Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn eds. Cultural Models in Language and Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 43-66)

It's just not the case that Americans are committed to absolute truth. This makes Americans no different from the Chinese. If we clear out the moralistic overtones — the canard that “we” are truthful and “they” are not — we might become more curious about just what those differences are between how Americans and Chinese relate to “truth,” and we might be less inclined to perpetuate stereotypes.