ABSTRACT
When people decide who is lying and who is telling the truth, a common finding is that people tend to guess that others are telling the truth. This ‘truth bias’ has been explained from a range of psychological perspectives. Social perspectives suggest that people do not want to discover that they are being lied to, while psycholinguistic accounts have proposed that people default to believe information is true. A cognitive perspective has argued that the truth bias is a sign of adaptive and functional decision-making based on the low diagnostic information that is available. This chapter explores the accusatory reluctance perspective, the Spinozan mind hypothesis, Truth-Default Theory (TDT) and the Adaptive Lie Detector (ALIED) account, concluding with a comparison of the two most contemporary accounts in the field: TDT and ALIED.
