Exploring how our natural inclination to believe in the honesty of others shapes our communication and social interactions. Tim Levine uncovers the reasons behind our vulnerability to deception and highlights the benefits of defaulting to truth and its role in the development of human civilization, culture, and relationships.

Communication is an essential part of being human. Communication allows up to us learn from others and to pass along things we have learned to others. With communication, we can cooperate with other people and coordinate our activities to accomplish tasks and goals that are not individually possible. Forming meaningful and lasting relationships with other humans requires communication. Effective and efficient communication enables human civilization, scientific and technological progress, and the creation and transition of human cultures.

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Join me for a moment in a thought experiment. Imagine a communication ecology where truth and honesty were not the default. Communication could not and should not be trusted in such a dystopian world. We would all bog down in uncertainty. Assessing the veracity of every incoming bit of information is an unthinkable burden. Communicative solipsism would be deeply dysfunctional.

I am the author of truth-default theory and the book Duped: Truth-default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception [1]. Truth-default theory is a social scientific theory that seeks to makes sense out of some puzzling findings from research on human-to-human deception and deception detection. The central most idea is that truth and honesty are the default modes of communication. People are typically honest unless they have a specific reason to communicate deceptively, and people tend to believe others unless suspicion, skepticism, or doubt is actively triggered. Conscious thoughts of honesty or dishonesty do not come to mind unless there is a motive or trigger. For example, until reading this sentence, most readers will not have wondered if I really wrote Duped, or if truth-default theory is really a thing. After reading this, consideration of veracity is brought to mind (i.e., “triggered”), but most readers still will not seriously entertain that this article might be fiction. Fortunately, I lack a reason to misrepresent my ideas. My interests are served well by being honest. This is the case here, and it is the case in most but certainly not all communication situations.

Before there was a truth-default default theory, there were experiments giving people lie detection tasks of various sorts. People were shown some number of communications, and asked to sort the truths from the falsehoods. Across hundreds of studies with many variations, a robust and coherent collection of findings emerged [2]. First off, in real-time assessments, people invariably performed poorly. The average was 54% correct, where chance was fifty-fifty. Second, people believed more often than they doubted. That is, even when explicitly prompted to assess veracity with forewarning of the possibility of deceit, people were still truth-biased. Consequently, participants in lie detection tasks got honest messages right more often than they correctly identify falsehoods as false.

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In most communication, the possibility of deception does not even come to mind

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