A fresh investigation suggests that the way people interpret facts, authenticity, or lines of coherent beliefs helps explain their disagreements about what is true.
Maria and Peter are college students who meet up for a late dinner. Peter asks Maria whether Tom will be at the party they plan to attend after dinner. Maria replies that Tom will be there, since Tom had told her he would join. When they arrive at the party, it becomes clear that Tom had altered his plans and is not present.
This setup was shown to participants in a new European study. They were then asked: Was Maria’s assertion true or false?
From my viewpoint, Maria’s statement is evidently false. In other words, I am fully aligned with the correspondence theory of truth. Yet the study, published in Cognition, revealed that only a little over half of participants would share my stance. In fact, many people tend to equate truth with how well a claim fits into a person’s coherent network of beliefs or with whether a belief is authentic—that is, sincere and honest.
To examine how ordinary people regard truth, the researchers first built conceptual maps with 200 participants, asking how similar truth is to related ideas. For example, correspondence aligns with notions of “reality” and “fact”; coherence corresponds to “justification” and “reason”; and authenticity ties to “honesty” and “transparency.” Although many participants endorsed elements from all three notions of truth, a straightforward, winner-takes-all summary showed that 55 percent most strongly associated truth with correspondence.
Put differently, a simple majority believes that truth is defined by empirical reality.
Next, the researchers investigated whether these theories of truth remain stable within individuals over time. Three months later, they managed to reconnect with 128 of the original participants and asked them again to judge the Maria vignette. This time the question was binary: Was Maria’s statement true or false? The researchers explained that a “true” response reflects an authenticity- or coherence-based understanding, emphasizing Maria’s sincerity or justification at the moment of speaking, whereas a “false” response reflects a correspondence view, judging truth by its alignment with reality. I can accept that Maria might try to defend her sincere and honest belief that Tom would be at the party, but the bare truth is that he was not there.
In the follow-up, it turned out that an individual’s concept of truth modestly predicted how they evaluated Maria’s claim. The researchers note, “Overall 68 (53.13%) participants judged Maria’s answer as false (endorsing a correspondence view) and 60 (46.89%) judged it true (endorsing authenticity or coherence-based truth). Once again, a simple majority anchored truth to factual reality.”
In an article summarizing their results for Psyche, the researchers describe how different truth conceptions can fuel conflicts:
Imagine someone making a statement about climate change. The debate tends to unfold in a predictable pattern: one side posts links to data (correspondence), the other pays less attention to data and counters with accusations of bad faith (authenticity), or they argue that the claim is false because it conflicts with everything else they already hold to be true (coherence). In such disputes, simply dumping more evidence that supports your position could worsen the quarrel rather than settle it.
We have all found ourselves in that situation, have we not? Even those who subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth must still grapple with the enduring challenge of confirmation bias.
As I mentioned some time ago, research by Yale law professor Dan Kahan shows that as scientific literacy rises, partisan polarization around climate change also intensifies. In other words, the more science people know, the more they can locate information that buttresses their existing beliefs.
Nevertheless, the European team of researchers remains hopeful that recognizing the variations in how people conceive truth could help us navigate political and policy disagreements more productively.
