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Are communicators perceived as committed to what they actually say (what is explicit), or to what they mean (including what is implicit)? Some research claims that explicit communication leads to a higher attribution of commitment and more accountability than implicit communication. Here we present theoretical arguments and experimental data to the contrary. We present three studies exploring whether the saying–meaning distinction affects commitment attribution in promises, and, crucially, whether commitment attribution is further modulated by the degree to which the hearer will actually rely on the promise. Our results support the conclusion that people perceive communicators to be committed to ‘what is meant’, and not simply to ‘what is said’. Our findings add to the experimental literature showing that the saying–meaning distinction is not as pivotal to social relations as often assumed, and that its role in commitment attribution might be overestimated. The attribution of commitment is strongly dependent on the (mutually known) relevance of ‘what is meant’.
Communication often involves making a commitment of some sort, for instance to a future action. But what does communicators’ commitment amount to? Specifically, are communicators taken to be committed to what they actually say (what is explicit), or to what they mean (including what is implicit)? Some researchers claim that communicating implicit information leads to a lower attribution of commitment and less accountability than does communicating explicit information. Here we present two studies exploring whether the implicit-explicit distinction affects commitment attribution in promises (commissive speech acts), and, crucially, whether commitment attribution is further modulated by degree to which the hearer will actually rely on the promise. Our results support the conclusion that people perceive communicators to be committed to ‘what is meant’, and not simply to ‘what is said’. More generally, our findings add to the experimental literature showing that the implicit-explicit distinction is less pervasive than previously claimed, and that its role in commitment attribution might have been overestimated.
Can commitments be generated without promises or gestures conventionally interpreted as such? We hypothesized that people believe that commitments are in place when one agent has led a recipient to rely on her to do something, even without a commissive speech act or any action conventionalized as such, and this is mutual knowledge. To probe this, we presented participants with online vignettes describing everyday situations in which a recipient's expectations were frustrated by one's behavior. Our results show that moral judgments differed significantly according to whether the recipient's reliance was mutually known, irrespective of whether this was verbally acknowledged.
In everyday conversation, messages are often communicated indirectly or implicitly. Why do people sometimes communicate so inefficiently? How speakers choose to express a message (modulating confidence, using less explicit formulations) has been proposed to impact how committed they will appear to be to its content. We investigated two factors that may influence speaker accountability and the deniability of implicitly conveyed messages. In a preregistered online study, we tested the hypothesis that the degree of meaning strength (strongly or weakly communicated) and the level of meaning used by the speaker (an enrichment or a conversational implicature) modulate accountability and plausible deniability. Our results support these predictions both for level of meaning and for meaning strength. Participants’ responses indicated that enrichments were harder to deny than conversational implicatures, and that strongly implied contents were more difficult to deny that weakly implied contents. Furthermore, participants held speakers more accountable for strongly than for weakly implied contents. These results corroborate the differences found in the literature between levels of meaning (enrichment vs. implicature). Importantly, they also highlight the largely understudied role of meaning strength as a cue to speaker commitment in communication.
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