Pinker, Nowak, and Lee do an interesting perspectives
article in PNAS that looks more rigorously at why we don't just blurt out what we mean, as in:
- Would you like to come up and see my etchings? [a sexual come-on]
- If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome. [a polite request]
- Nice store you got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it. [a threat]
- We're counting on you to show leadership in our Campaign for the Future. [a solicitation for a donation]
- Gee, officer, is there some way we could take care of the ticket here? [a bribe]
Here is their abstract:
When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language as a digital medium, which allows a sentence to generate common knowledge, to propagate a message with high fidelity, and to serve as a reference point in coordination games. This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct one even when the speaker and listener can infer each other's intentions with high confidence.
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