Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed‐false claims, for instance by merely conversationally implicating them. In this paper, we subject this claim to an empirical test. In a preregistered study of 300 participants, we investigate how people judge cases of implicit deceptions that would usually be excluded by the traditional definition of lying (i.e., conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and nonverbal actions). Our results show that people do in fact consider it possible to lie by indirect means, suggesting that people have a broader concept of lying than is usually assumed. Moreover, our findings indicate that lie judgments are closely tied to the extent to which agents are perceived as having committed themselves to the believed‐false claims they have communicated. We discuss the implications of our results for the traditional definition of lying and propose a new commitment‐based definition of lying that can account for the findings of our experiment.

中文翻译：

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说谎与承诺有关吗？对欺骗性预设、含义和行为的实证研究

说谎是一种重要的道德现象，大多数人每天都会受到影响——无论是在人际关系中、政治辩论中，还是假新闻的形式。然而，令人惊讶的是，人们对什么真正构成谎言知之甚少。根据撒谎的传统定义，如果一个人明确表达他们认为是虚假的东西，就会撒谎。因此，人们通常认为人们不能通过更间接地传达可信的虚假声明来撒谎，例如仅仅通过对话暗示他们。在本文中，我们对这一主张进行了实证检验。在一项对 300 名参与者进行预先注册的研究中，我们调查了人们如何判断通常会被传统说谎定义（即会话含义、预设、和非语言行为）。我们的结果表明，人们实际上确实认为可以通过间接手段撒谎，这表明人们对撒谎的概念比通常假设的更广泛。此外，我们的研究结果表明，谎言判断与代理人被认为已承诺他们所传达的可信虚假声明的程度密切相关。我们讨论了我们的结果对传统撒谎定义的影响，并提出了一个新的基于承诺的撒谎定义，可以解释我们的实验结果。我们的研究结果表明，谎言判断与代理人被认为已承诺他们所传达的可信虚假声明的程度密切相关。我们讨论了我们的结果对传统撒谎定义的影响，并提出了一个新的基于承诺的撒谎定义，可以解释我们的实验结果。我们的研究结果表明，谎言判断与代理人被认为已承诺他们所传达的可信虚假声明的程度密切相关。我们讨论了我们的结果对传统撒谎定义的影响，并提出了一个新的基于承诺的撒谎定义，可以解释我们的实验结果。