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Imagination sometimes leads people to behave, feel, and think as though imagined events were real even when they know they were not. In this paper, we suggest that some understanding of these phenomena can be achieved by differentiating between Implicit Truth Value (ITV), a spontaneous truth evaluation, and Explicit Truth Value (ETV), a self-reported truth judgment. In three experiments, we measure ITV using the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (Sartori, Agosta, Zogmaister, Ferrara, & Castiello, 2008), which has been used to assess which of two autobiographical events is true. Our findings demonstrate that imagining an event, like experiencing an event, increases its ITV, even when people explicitly acknowledge the imagined event as false (Experiments 1a and 1b). Furthermore, we show that imagined representations generated from a first-person perspective have higher ITV than imagined representations generated from a third-person perspective (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that implicit and explicit measures of truth differ in their sensitivity to properties underlying truth judgment. We discuss the contribution of characterizing events according to both ITV and ETV to the understanding of various psychological phenomena, such as lying and self-deception.

We assume that a state of distrust is the mental system’s signal that the environment is not normal—things may not be as they appear. Hence, individuals sense they should be on guard. In particular, they are likely to avoid routine strategies, ones proven to be optimal and regularly used in normal environments, because these strategies are easily anticipated by whoever may be seeking to deceive them. Conversely, a state of trust is associated with a feeling of safety. The environment is as it normally is and things really are as they appear to be. Thus, individuals see no reason to refrain from doing what they routinely do. Accordingly, we hypothesize that figuring out a new situation depends on the type of environment and the actor’s state of mind: in normal environments, where routine strategies are optimal, individuals who trust should outperform those who distrust; however, in unusual environments, where non-routine strategies are optimal, individuals who distrust should outperform those who trust. This paper reports three experiments that manipulate distrust via orienting tasks that participants perform prior to attempting to predict a series of events (Experiments 1 and 2) or solve matchstick arithmetic problems (Experiment 3). Performance success depends on discovering and implementing an appropriate rule. We found that, as predicted, the manipulation of distrust sensitized participants to the existence of non-routine contingencies, that is, contingencies that were not expected.

In making social judgments people process effects caused by humans differently from effects caused by non-human agencies. We assume that when they have to predict outcomes that are attributed to non-human causes, people acknowledge their ignorance and try to focus on what is most diagnostic. However, when events are attributed to human agency, they believe that nothing is arbitrary and that one can understand the decision situation well enough to eliminate error. If so, then people should behave differently when an uncertainty is attributed to chance (a non-human agency) or to deception (a human agency). We tested this prediction using the probability-matching paradigm and found reasonable support for our analysis in four experiments. Individuals who attributed uncertainty to deception were less likely to adopt the optimal rule-based strategy than those who attributed it to chance. Indeed, only when the former were prevented from thinking about and elaborating the outcomes (the high-interference condition in Experiment 3) was their performance comparable to the level of individuals in the chance condition.

Negations (e.g., “Jim is not guilty”) are part of our daily language and communication. Linguistic and non-linguistic negations can occur when receivers counter-argue what communicators are saying, when hypotheses are disconfirmed, or through negative cognitive responses and many other social interactive processes. Our study explores how negations are encoded by considering the predictions of two theoretical models. According to the fusion model, the core of a negated message and the negation marker are integrated into one meaningful unit. Thus, Jim in the example might be encoded within the schema “innocence.” According to the schema-plus-tag model, a negated message is represented as a core supposition and a negation tag, allowing for dissociation of the two at a later point in time. We compare the two models by examining the nature of inferences that are facilitated by negations. Our results show that the existence of a schema that accommodates the meaning of the original negation is critical in determining how a negation will be encoded. When such a schema is not readily available, processing a negated message facilitates negation–incongruent associations, in line with predictions of the schema-plus-tag model. This model is also supported by analyses of respondents’ memory. We discuss implications of these findings for the communication of negated information, for discounting theories, and for the assessment of the truth of incoming information.

Social interactions often involve attempts to deal with information that is known to be invalid while at the same time using information that is known to be valid. To explore this process, we compare the success of discounting when the source of the to-be-ignored message also provides valid information with a case in which the to-be-used and the to-be-ignored messages are provided by different sources. It is found that when attempting to ignore invalid messages, receivers tend to undermine the impact of the valid messages when both types of messages are attributed to the same source. This does not happen when the valid and invalid messages are attributed to different sources. The study explores several mechanisms that may lead to this effect. It appears that ignoring one message undermines receivers' ability to use another message from the same source because of the associative links that are formed between the valid and the invalid messages.