Abstract
Deception social knowlegde and credibility. The present work attempts to increase knowledge about the psychosocial processes that affect the extent to which people believe strangers. Our general hypothesis is that social knowledge about lying will influence the decision to consider their messages as true or false. In order to test this hypothesis we presented verbal (orally) and non-verbal information that differed in their level of a greement with this knowledge. The results show that when the information assessed by the judges coincides with social knowledge about lying, it determines belief judgements, independently of whether the information is verbal or non-verbal. These results call into question the relevance of a great number of studies that concentrate on the differentiation between true and false messages according to their verbal or non-verbal presentation.
