Vol.:(0123456789) Review of Philosophy and Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00587-w 1 3 Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross‑Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers Louisa M. Reins 1  · Alex Wiegmann 2  · Olga P. Marchenko 3  · Irina Schumski 4 Accepted: 14 September 2021 © The Author(s) 2021 Abstract The present study examines cross-cultural diferences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to say something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample of N = 255 participants from Russia and N = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our fndings show a strong degree of simi- larity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agent saying something they believe to be false. 1 Introduction The practices of lying and deceiving constitute an important aspect of human communication that can be observed in virtually all societies and cultures. Although there is an extensive body of theoretical and empirical work on ques- tions that concern lying, only few empirical studies have investigated people’s * Louisa M. Reins louisareins@icloud.com 1 Institute of Psychology, Georg August University Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany 2 Institute for Philosophy II, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany 3 Insitute of Experimental Psychology, Center of Pre-University Education and Career Guidance, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education, Moscow, Russia 4 Department of Philosophy, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany