Systematic Thinking Underlying Cross-Cultural Differences in Deception Acceptability

This study aims to explore cultural differences between Spanish and Mexican individuals in how specific cognitive-based thinking explains judgment formation regarding deception acceptability. Here, participants from both populations were required to judge acceptability of actors´ lying and truth-telling tendencies across several social scenarios. These deception scenarios were built by considering experimental manipulation of the type of relationship with the deceiver, gender, motive, and deception consequences. Analysis results indicate that judgment formation of acceptability in both populations followed a cognitive summative rule to integrate factor information valuation. However, when considering valuation of telling lies to an unknown individual, acceptability was significantly different for the two populations. Spanish individuals viewed lying to an unknown individual significantly more acceptable than did Mexican participants.