People are willing to ignore facts and excuse falsehoods and misinformation if they feel it’s possible the lies could become true eventually, according to a study of organizational behavior conducted at the London Business School.

What to Know:

• People who know something is a lie think it is less unethical to tell that lie if they can imagine it might one day become true because they judge its broader message as truer.

• The more morally acceptable people think it is to tell a particular falsehood, the less accountable they will hold the people who tell it, and the more inclined they will be to spread the falsehood themselves.

• Even when study participants knew a statement was false, they could justify the dishonesty and excuse it based on a future they could imagine.

• Encouraging people to think carefully about the ethicality of statements was insufficient to reduce the effects of imagining a future where it might be true.

• Letting people off the hook for dishonesty contributes to a “post-truth” era that undermines trust in society and institutions and makes it harder for some people to accept facts if those facts don’t align with a desired outcome.

This is a summary of the article “It Might Become True: How Prefactual Thinking Licenses Dishonesty,” published by the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Psychology on April 14, 2022. The full article can be found on eurekalert.org.

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