ArticleOpen mind : discoveries in cognitive science2020
Polite Speech Emerges From Competing Social Goals.
Article in Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spoken disagreement is more constructive than written disagreement.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Quantifying Epistemic Relevance.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Speakers Use Indirect Language to Pursue Their Own Goals While Managing Social Relationships.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Relevant answers to polar questions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The alignment model of indirect communication.PloS one · 2025Article
- On the Role of Loopholes in Polite Communication: Linking Subjectivity and Pragmatic Inference.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Teachers recruit mentalizing regions to represent learners' beliefs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Active Iterative Social Inference in Multi-Trial Signaling Games.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2023Article
- Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modelling perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A Pragmatic Account of the Weak Evidence Effect.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
- Modeling Individual Differences in Children's Information Integration During Pragmatic Word Learning.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
- How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Children's reputation management: Learning to identify what is socially valued and acting upon it.Current directions in psychological science · 2021Article
- Learning from other minds: An optimistic critique of reinforcement learning models of social learning.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2021Article
- Polite Speech Emerges From Competing Social Goals.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Language is a remarkably efficient tool for transmitting information. Yet human speakers make statements that are inefficient, imprecise, or even contrary to their own beliefs, all in the service of being polite. What rational machinery underlies polite language use? Here, we show that polite speech emerges from the competition of three communicative goals: to convey information, to be kind, and to present oneself in a good light. We formalize this goal tradeoff using a probabilistic model of utterance production, which predicts human utterance choices in socially sensitive situations with high quantitative accuracy, and we show that our full model is superior to its variants with subsets of the three goals. This utility-theoretic approach to speech acts takes a step toward explaining the richness and subtlety of social language use.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.