When considering our tendency to “Truth Bias”, it is no surprise that what people say, and how the listener interprets what is said, can be two different things. What we say, the words we choose, and the bias of the person listening, can all impact on how something is interpreted, and there can be much meaning that is left hidden at first glance too.
Reading an excerpt from Schafer’s “Catch a Liar” he recounts his personal experience of memory loss, and the need to relearn his vocabulary. This taught him the valuable lesson that “words have meaning”. While that is basically a dictionary definition, his point is that words are deliberate. They are a deliberate part of communicating and conveying a specific meaning, and the word that someone chooses can give clues to their thought processes and behavioural characteristics. He goes on to highlight what words convey, such as the example “‘I walked quickly’, the word clue “quickly” infused a sense of urgency but did not provide a reason for the sense of urgency”. His point is that picking up on these clues can create opportunity to identify and make an educated guess about the things that are not being said.
Putting this in the context of truth bias, here’s an illustrative example:
Client: “We’d like to place a large order with your business. Do you have capacity?”
Salesperson: “We should meet your targets. We will be expanding our capacity in the near future”.
Client: “Great.”
Truth bias has influenced the client’s interpretation here. They expect to be told the truth, and in all probability have been, but the salesperson has left room for the company to miss their targets. Words like “should” and “near future” provide reassurance while being vague enough to not actually commit, while the client has leaned into their truth bias because they want it to be true, and they want to receive their goods on time.
Truth bias is part of the reason that misinformation is so rife. We begin to build innate trust in certain sources of information, to the point that we believe anything we are told from those sources. A healthy dose of skepticism, combined with practising critical thinking skills can help to provide more accurate information. For example:
Client: “We’d like to place a large order with your business. Do you have capacity?”
Salesperson: “We should meet your targets. We will be expanding our capacity in the near future”.
Client: [registers ‘should’ and ‘near future’] “OK. How soon will you have the capacity?”
Salesperson: “We haven’t got a start date yet, but we will complete our upscale within the year.”
The two exchanges have very different meanings, simply because the client is aware of their truth bias and used critical thinking skills to determine the more accurate information.
Apply this at a much larger scale to the thousands of pieces of information we receive daily, and it is essential to be aware of our bias when processing information. News articles, social media posts, text messages, conversations; each one has the potential to include omitted information and meanings that are there for the asking, but we probably forget to ask.
