Research Article Believe It or Not On the Possibility of Suspending Belief Uri Hasson, 1 Joseph P. Simmons, 2 and Alexander Todorov 2 1 Brain Research Imaging Center, The University of Chicago, and 2 Department of Psychology, Princeton University ABSTRACT—We present two experiments that cast doubt on existing evidence suggesting that it is impossible to suspend belief in a comprehended proposition. In Experiment 1, we found that interrupting the encoding of a statement’s ve- racity decreased memory for the statement’s falsity when the false version of the statement was uninformative, but not when the false version was informative. This suggests that statements that are informative when false are not represented as if they were true. In Experiment 2, partici- pants made faster lexical decisions to words implied by preceding statements when they were told that the state- ments were true than when the veracity of the statements was unknown or when the statements were false. The findings suggest that comprehending a statement may not require believing it, and that it may be possible to suspend belief in comprehended propositions. Is it possible to suspend belief in a comprehended proposition? In attempting to answer this question, Gilbert (1991) distin- guished between the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza. According to Descartes, people first comprehend a proposition and then later assess its veracity. Thus, in Descartes’ view, comprehension precedes belief, and belief suspension is there- fore possible. In contrast, according to Spinoza, comprehending a proposition requires believing it to be true. Thus, in his view, comprehension and belief occur simultaneously, and belief suspension is therefore impossible. Although Descartes’ position on this issue is more intuitively appealing, existing evidence seems to favor the Spinozan view. This evidence comes in two forms. First, there is research sug- gesting that truth is represented more quickly and easily than falsity. People are quicker to assess the veracity of true than false statements (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1976), and they more easily represent true than false propositions (Johnson-Laird & Savary, 1999). Second, Gilbert and his colleagues have demonstrated that when people are under cognitive load or time pressure, they tend to misremember and misrepresent false information as being true (Gilbert, Krull, & Malone, 1990; Gilbert, Tafarodi, & Malone, 1993). In a study ostensibly about language learning, Gilbert et al. (1990, Experiment 1) presented participants with state- ments about the meaning of words in the Hopi language (e.g., A tica is a fox). Each statement was presented on a computer screen for 8 s, and then immediately followed by the word true or false to indicate whether the proposition was an accurate or inaccurate statement about the Hopi language. Critically, on some learning trials, participants were asked to respond as quickly as possible to the sound of a tone, which was meant to interrupt the encoding of the proposition’s veracity by depleting participants’ cognitive resources. After this learning phase, participants were presented with some of these propositions and were required to recall whether they were originally presented as true or as false. Results were consistent with the Spinozan hypothesis; interruption decreased the recall accuracy of false but not true statements. Participants’ recall accuracy was 55% for uninterrupted true propositions, 58% for interrupted true propositions, and 55% for uninterrupted false propositions, but only 35% for interrupted false proposi- tions. Gilbert et al. (1990, Experiment 2) replicated this effect with different materials (smiling faces that were either sincere or insincere) and a more difficult interruption task that required participants to judge whether the interrupting tone was high pitched or low pitched. Gilbert (1991) interpreted these demonstrations as evidence for a dual-process model of belief. At Stage 1, propositions are simultaneously comprehended and believed. Subsequently, at Stage 2, people effortfully ‘‘unbelieve’’ false propositions. Cog- nitive load interrupts the two-stage process before it runs to completion, causing the process to output after Stage 1. Conse- quently, cognitive load causes false propositions to remain believed, and therefore to be wrongly recalled as true. This dual- process model has been used to explain a variety of effects, Address correspondence to Uri Hasson, Brain Research Imaging Center, Biological Sciences Division, The University of Chicago, 5841 S. Maryland Ave., MC-2030, Chicago, IL 60637; e-mail: uhasson@ uchicago.edu. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 566 Volume 16—Number 7 Copyright r 2005 American Psychological Society