Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do people engage in “expressive responding” – lying about their beliefs to express support for their in-group? A classic study by Schaffner and Lucks (2018) provided strong evidence of expressive responding in support of Donald Trump among people who voted for him. However, this study was not pre-registered, meaning that the robustness of this finding is uncertain. Our poster reports the results of a pre-registered replication study conducted over two years after the original study. Moreover, we highlight the relevance of work on expressive responding (and other forms of insincere responding) for research in cognitive science which tends to assume that participants report their beliefs sincerely.