Disregard for Native Language Rules of Speech Predicts Disregard for Truth-Telling

Inspired by general deviance theory, which proposes that individual traits predispose people to violate multiple types of norms or rules, we suggest that disregard for native language rules of speech may be positively correlated with disregard for other social norms such as truth-telling. Specifically, we hypothesize that given the opportunity to gain financially through untruthful statements, native-born speakers who speak incorrectly will be more likely to exploit it than their counterparts who speak correctly. We report the results of testing this hypothesis on Israeli students, using two double-stage experiments. The first stage, identical in both experiments, was intended to identify untruthful statements by applying the popular die-under-the-cup task. The second stage, aimed at identifying incorrect pronunciation, differed between the two experiments. In the first experiment, participants were asked to read aloud 10 sentences, whereas in the second experiment, conducted in writing, participants were presented with the same 10 sentences, this time phrased as questions with multiple-choice answers regarding the correct pronunciation. Our hypothesis that untruthful statements are positively correlated with incorrect speech was confirmed in both experiments, thereby providing empirical support for the notion that linguistic norm violations may extend beyond the domain of grammar and be linked to broader patterns of social norm disregard, such as truth-telling.