Believe It or Not: On the Possibility of Suspending Belief

@article{citeulike:246655, 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 veracity 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, participants made faster lexical decisions to words implied by preceding statements when they were told that the statements 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.}, author = {Hasson, Uri and Simmons, Joseph P. and Todorov, Alexander }, citeulike-article-id = {246655}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01576.x}, issn = {0956-7976}, journal = {Psychological Science}, keywords = {belief, social-cognition}, month = {July}, number = {7}, pages = {566--571}, posted-at = {2005-07-06 10:17:22}, priority = {0}, publisher = {Blackwell Publishing}, title = {Believe It or Not: On the Possibility of Suspending Belief}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01576.x}, volume = {16}, year = {2005} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:246655 L3 - citeulike-article-id:246655 TI - Believe It or Not: On the Possibility of Suspending Belief JF - Psychological Science VL - 16 IS - 7 SP - 566 EP - 571 PB - Blackwell Publishing SN - 0956-7976 N2 - 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 veracity 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, participants made faster lexical decisions to words implied by preceding statements when they were told that the statements 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. KW - belief KW - social-cognition AU - Hasson, Uri AU - Simmons, Joseph AU - Todorov, Alexander PY - 2005/07// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01576.x ER -