How Word Reversibility Impacts Judgment Confidence

From interpersonal conversations to commercial and political messaging, our world revolves around people making sense of communications. In this research, we illustrate how specific lexical choices systematically shape recipients’ confidence in their judgment of a message’s truthfulness. Prior work has shown that words can differ in their “reversibility,” that is, how easily their antonyms can be retrieved. We propose a novel theoretical framework that predicts when and how statements containing concepts with different levels of reversibility engage distinct psychological processes, which in turn differentially affect downstream judgments of confidence. We test this model across two experiments (N=1,067) using truthfulness judgments arising from both participants’ existing beliefs and experimentally manipulated beliefs.