Utilitarian relevance and face management in the interpretation of ambiguous question/request statements

Demeure, Virginie; Bonnefon, Jean‐François; Raufaste, Éric

doi:10.3758/mc.36.4.873

Cited by 9 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…As an additional test, we also use the literature on face management to form expectations about the types of linguistic patterns we may observe in these open‐ended explanations if people are actually engaging in face saving (Demeure, Bonnefon, & Raufaste, ; Holtgraves, ). Specifically, people who save face are more likely to hedge, frame their preferences as being better for some anonymous other, qualify their explanations, and offer extraneous information.…”

Section: Experimental Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Saving Face: Identifying Voter Responses to Black Candidates and Female Candidates

Krupnikov

Piston

Bauer

2015

Political Psychology

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Much of what we know about the responses of voters to Black candidates and female candidates comes from experimental research. Yet the accuracy of experimental data can be threatened by the possibility that social desirability pressures contaminate self-reporting. We address this threat in a project that considers psychological approaches to reducing social desirability pressures. Offering participants the opportunity to explain their decisions about sensitive subjects, such as voting for a Black or female candidate, can lessen social desirability pressures. We analyze this approach across three commonly used samples: undergraduate, adult convenience, and adult national. Our results suggest that existing experimental research overestimates voter support for Black and female candidates, but these issues can be mitigated with the simple innovation presented here.

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Section: Experimental Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Saving Face: Identifying Voter Responses to Black Candidates and Female Candidates

Krupnikov

Piston

Bauer

2015

Political Psychology

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“…In a face-to-face setting where the subject (i.e., James) is also present, politeness concerns will usually lead to an even greater reluctance to express negative information. Empirical studies have shown that people are sensitive to pragmatic implications of these politeness concerns and adjust their understanding accordingly (e.g., Bonnefon, Feeney, & Villejoubert, 2009;Bonnefon & Villejoubert, 2006;Demeure, Bonnefon, & Raufaste, 2008, 2009Juanchich, Sirota, & Butler, 2012;.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

James is polite and punctual (and useless): A Bayesian formalisation of faint praise

Harris

Corner

Hahn

2013

Thinking & Reasoning

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Damned by faint praise" is the phenomenon whereby weak positive information leads to a negative change in belief. This seemingly conflicts with normative Bayesian predictions, which prescribe that positive information should only exert a positive change in belief. We argue that the negative belief change is due to an inference from critical missing evidence; that is, an implicit argument from ignorance. Such an inference is readily incorporated within a version of Bayes' theorem incorporating the concept of epistemic closure. This reformalisation provides a general theoretical framework for the phenomenon that clearly outlines those conditions under which it should be observed, and its conceptual relationship with other argumentation phenomena.

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“…Indirectness, as expressed in so-called negative politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1978/1987, is identified as the most polite of these strategies. As highlighted in Demeure et al (2008), indirectness as a politeness strategy is intimately linked to the interpretation of ambiguous statements. Specifically, knowing that a speaker can use indirectness to soften a potentially face-threatening act should lead the listener to search for the most face-threatening interpretation of an ambiguous statement.…”

Section: Faceworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These power and distance variables have led to mixed results (Brown & Gilman, 1989;Demeure et al, 2008;Holtgraves, 1994;Holtgraves & Yang, 1990;Slugoski & Turnbull, 1988; see Spencer-Oatey, 1996 for a review). Our two experiments aim at investigating their effect in the context of the request/disagreement ambiguity.…”

Section: Faceworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The lack of research addressing this kind of ambiguity is perhaps because of the fact that they are not an ideal test bed for the traditional Gricean and post-Gricean (relevance) approaches (Grice, 1957(Grice, , 1975Sperber & Wilson, 1995), as I will argue further in this article, and are more easily handled by an approach combining facework and utilitarian relevance (Demeure et al, 2008).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Facework and Utilitarian Relevance in the Disambiguation of Statements With Two Indirect Interpretations

Demeure

2010

Journal of Language and Social Psychology

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Ambiguous statements are quite frequent in everyday life and are therefore the subject of numerous theoretical and empirical investigations. This article explores the interpretation of ambiguous request/disagreement statements such as "I am afraid I do not follow you" in the light of utilitarian and face-management approaches. It offers a combined test of some key predictions of these two approaches on an original kind of ambiguity between two contrasting indirect interpretations. The results support the utilitarian approach, offer new perspectives on the facework approach, and suggest that this combined approach can be generalized to a large range of ambiguous statements.

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Utilitarian relevance and face management in the interpretation of ambiguous question/request statements

Cited by 9 publications

References 24 publications

Saving Face: Identifying Voter Responses to Black Candidates and Female Candidates

Saving Face: Identifying Voter Responses to Black Candidates and Female Candidates

James is polite and punctual (and useless): A Bayesian formalisation of faint praise

Facework and Utilitarian Relevance in the Disambiguation of Statements With Two Indirect Interpretations

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