Registered report: The role of consequence in evaluating claims as true or false

Even when people know how accurate a claim of fact is, evaluating it as ‘true’ or ‘false’ is complicated given the imprecisions of natural language. How do people decide whether an approximate claim should be considered true or false? We test whether truth evaluations depend on the consequences of a claim’s approximation—i.e., whether the approximation caused something to happen that otherwise would not have happened. In Study 1 (N=880) and Study 2 (N=1130), participants were more likely to consider a claim false when its approximation was consequential. Study 3 (N=402), using a game with real monetary stakes, found that the strength of this effect depended on whether the consequences of a claim’s approximation were good or bad. These findings suggest that, even when people know exactly how well an approximate claim corresponds to the facts, truth evaluations depend on whether the claim’s approximation mattered in context.