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The illusory transparency of intention: linguistic perspective taking in text
1Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, IL 60637.
Cognitive Psychology
|April 1, 1994
Summary
Readers often attribute sarcasm to others, even in writing, based on their own beliefs about the speaker's intent. This suggests people use more than just relevant information when interpreting communication.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Linguistics
- Social Psychology
Background:
- Understanding how individuals interpret ambiguous communication is crucial in social interactions.
- Previous theories of language use often assume listeners/readers exclusively utilize perspective-relevant information.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether people attribute perceived sarcasm to others based on their own knowledge, even when that knowledge is irrelevant to the addressee.
- To examine the role of privileged information in the attribution of sarcasm perception.
Main Methods:
- Participants read scenarios with ambiguous statements and judged the addressee's likely perception of sarcasm.
- Experiments manipulated the information available to participants versus the hypothetical addressee.
- Four distinct experimental designs were employed to test the hypothesis.
Main Results:
- When participants believed a speaker was being sarcastic, they were more likely to infer that the addressee also perceived sarcasm.
- This attribution occurred even when communication was written and lacked non-verbal cues like intonation.
- Participants utilized perspective-irrelevant information in their judgments.
Conclusions:
- Individuals' own beliefs about sarcasm influence their attributions of sarcasm perception to others.
- The findings challenge theories of language comprehension that posit the exclusive use of relevant information.
- This highlights a potential bias in social cognition and communication interpretation.