Tiptoeing around it: Inference from absence in potentially offensive speech
- Monica Gates, Psychology, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States
- Tess Veuthey, UCSF, SAN FRANCISCO, California, United States
- Michael Tessler, Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States
- Kevin Smith, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Tobias Gerstenberg, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Laurie Bayet, Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
- Josh Tenenbaum, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
AbstractLanguage that describes people in a concise manner may conflict with social norms (e.g., referring to people by their race), presenting a conflict between transferring information efficiently and avoiding offensive language. When a speaker is describing others, we propose that listeners consider the speaker’s use or absence of potentially offensive language to reason about the speaker’s goals. We formalize this hypothesis in a probabilistic model of polite pragmatic language understanding, and use it to generate predictions about interpretations of utterances in ambiguous contexts, which we test empirically. We find that participants are sensitive to potentially offensive language when resolving ambiguity in reference. These results support the idea that listeners represent conflicts in speakers’ goals and use that uncertainty to interpret otherwise underspecified utterances.