Nobody Asked

A Preregistered Test of the Negation Rule in Readers of a Committee Candidate's Statement

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Continuous Improvement reports a preregistered experiment in which 644 adults read one election statement by a candidate for the committee of a fictional storage cooperative. A denial of misconduct that nobody had asked for raised readers' estimates that the candidate had done the thing denied, more so when pressed emphatically, while the same denial given in answer to a question was largely excused; a week later, readers who had forgotten the question no longer excused it.

@misc{slop_rtsl49,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma and Vigdis Emenike and Solveig Adeyemi},
  title        = {Nobody Asked: A Preregistered Test of the Negation Rule in Readers of a Committee Candidate's Statement},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.rtsl49},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-preregistered-vignette-rtsl49/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}