ABSTRACT
Suspicion is a fact of life. Of the many people with whom we communicate daily, some, unbeknownst to us (or to them), are very likely to be telling us an untruth. Moreover, it is a recognized fact of life: When a convenient sample of students at the University of Michigan was asked to recall the various people with whom they had spoken over the past several days and to estimate the probability that one or more of these people had either intentionally or accidentally told the respondents something that was mistaken, untrue, or invalid, the average estimate was well over .50. This may not be surprising in light of the fact that these same individuals described about a quarter of their conversations as involving some gossip or rumor. Furthermore, over 20% of the conversations were reported to contain irony, hyperbole, sarcasm, metaphor, or other conversational devices that assume a wary listener, one who automatically recognizes and recodes the “error” in explicit statements to grasp the “underlying (and intended) truth.” The threat of receiving invalid information is sufficiently pervasive in social life that some argue that people have evolved an “early warning” system that comes into play when an action on the basis of erroneous knowledge has significant costs (e.g., Cosmides, 1989; Cosmides & Tooby, 1989; Kraut, 1978). In this chapter, we discuss how people attempt to cope in such an uncertain environment. In particular, we focus on how people prepare for falsehoods while receiving information, and how they ignore them once they are discovered.
