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(gentle thoughtful music)
- Good afternoon, I'm Andrew Garrett,
the Chair of the Linguistics Department
here at UC Berkeley.
And I'm happy to welcome you to the second
Charles M. and Martha Hitchock
Lecture by Steven Pinker.
We saw in yesterday's lecture,
and anyone who's read Steve's books knows
that he has the rare ability
to make the most complex
set of ideas understandable,
the most challenging problems, tractable.
He also has a talent for finding
and clearly showing the
most vivid examples.
This is an especially valuable
skill for linguists like me.
We spend our days playing
in the glorious sandbox
of human language.
Our little shovels are
digital recording machines.
Our buckets are scholarly
articles and monographs.
And a lot of us are scared
of climbing out of the sand.
Steve comes with a broad sense
of the whole human playground
and is smart enough to
tell us how the lovely
grains of sand matter.
In each area of linguistic
science where has ventured,
therefore, I see a line running straight
from the most interesting
details of language
to very big questions about the mind.
For example, about 25 years ago,
Steve's first work that I happened to read
explored how individual
idiosyncrasies of usage
in real sentences like:
That experience grew me up in a hurry.
Or General Alexander Haig's,
"Let me caveat that."
cast important light on
the cognitive underpinnings
of language as used even by those
who are less louche linguistically.
The actual patterns of
idiosyncrasy, Steve argued,
support a highly structured model
of human linguistic cognition.
This has been a theme of Steve's work
showing that evidence
from both natural usage
and controlled experiments.
And he designs very created
psycholinguistic studies,
shows how intricately
structured what he has called
the human language instinct must be.
People who aren't language
geeks might be startled
by the number of papers in our field
trying to explain exactly why,
even though the past
tense of sink is sank,
we say things like, "I synced my iPod."
Not, "I sank my iPod."
But the implications turn
out to be really significant,
helping us see whether
linguistic cognition
is associative or symbolic.
In this important debate, Steve has been
among the major participants
over several decades.
Of course, the nature
of the language faculty
raises questions of an
evolutionary nature.
If there is a language
extinct, did it evolve?
And if it evolved, how could that happen?
Steve is one of the two or three
leading participants
in that debate as well,
stressing, again, the significance
of what he entertainingly calls
the raffish idiosyncrasies
and seemingly peripheral,
but actually omnipresent,
features of human language.
Today we'll hear about
one of the newest strands
of Steve's research on
indirect speech acts,
a great topic for a Berkeley crowd
as I expect he'll explain.
I'd say more, but a
nod's as good as a wink
to a blind bat, if you know what I mean.
(audience laughing)
For the Elephant in the Room,
The Psychology of Innuendo and Euphemism,
please join me in welcoming
Professor Steven Pinker.
(audience applauding)
Thanks very much.
- Thank you very much, Andrew,
for that very kind introduction.
Why don't people just say what they mean?
Why do people sidestep, shilly-shally,
beat around the bush,
veil their intentions
in innuendo, euphemism,
double speak, and other
forms of verbal fig leaves,
counting on the reader
to catch their drift,
read between the lines
and connect the dots.
Let me give you some
examples of this phenomenon
of indirect speech.
Any of you who remember one of the
opening scenes of the movie Fargo
will recall that at one critical juncture
a pair of kidnappers with a hostage
tied up in the back seat of the car
is pulled over by a police officer
because the car is missing its plates.
The officer demands that
the driver hand over
his drivers license.
He proffers his wallet with
the driver's license showing
and a $50 bill extending ever so slightly.
And he says to the officer,
"I was thinking that maybe
"the best thing would
be to take care of it
"here in Brainerd."
which, of course, everyone
recognizes as a veiled bribe.
Another example of veiled bribe
can be seen in this New
Yorker cartoon in which
the driver says to the
officer, "What Hershey bar?
"I didn't see any Hershey bar."
Polite requests, "If you
could pass the guacamole,
"that would be awesome."
If you think about it, that sentence
does not make a whole lot of sense.
But somehow it sounds
a whole lot nicer than
"Give me the damn guacamole."
(audience laughing)
Any of you who have been
at a university fundraising event
are familiar with euphemistic schnoring,
such as, "We're counting on you
"to show leadership in our
campaign for the future."
Rather than, "You've got a lot of money,
"how about giving some of it to Berkeley?"
"Would you like to come
up and see my etchings?"
That has been recognized as
a sexual come on for so long
that in the 1930s, James Thurber
drew a cartoon in which a confused man
says to his date, "You wait here
"and I'll bring the etchings down."
(audience laughing)
And then fans of the
Sopranos might recognize
dialogue such as the following:
"I hear you're the jury
foreman in the Soprano trial.
"It's an important civic responsibility.
"You've got a wife and kids.
"We know you'll do the right thing."
(audience laughing)
Which, of course,
we all recognize as a veiled threat.
So the puzzle is why is bribes, requests,
seductions, solicitations and threats
so often veiled when
presumably both parties
know what they mean?
This is a topic that's in the general area
of a subfield of linguistics
called discourse or pragmatics.
And Andrew made reference to
the familiarity of that topic
here at Berkeley, in large part
because the pioneer of
this field was Paul Grice,
who proposed a overarching
principle called
the cooperative principle,
namely that the speaker
and hearer cooperate
to advance the conversation.
Penelope Brown and Stephen
Levinson extended Grice's ideas
in their politeness theory,
according to which the speaker
and hearer cooperate not
just to advance the message
but to maintain a nebulous
quality called face,
as in saving face and losing face.
My former colleague at
Stanford, Herb Clark,
in using language, proposes
that this phenomenon
falls under a phenomenon
that he calls joint action.
Language use is really
a form of joint action.
A joint action is one that is carried out
by an ensemble of people acting
in coordination with each other.
As simple example, think
of two people waltzing,
paddling a canoe, playing a
piano duet, or making love.
Well, all of these insights, I think,
help us understand
components of the phenomenon
of indirect speech.
But what they leave is why there should be
such a phenomenon in the first place.
If conversation was really a matter of
pure cooperation, cooperative
agents, you would expect,
would not bother with
all this indirectness
and beating around the
bush and treasure hunt
to figure out what the
speaker really means.
In general, when you have cooperators,
they can get away with a
minimum of communication
like a conspiratorial whisper.
There's no reason that they, the speaker,
should lay out all of these puzzles
of indirectness and euphemism.
Also, joint actions, like
waltzing, paddling a canoe,
or making love, are usually
conducted in an atmosphere
of relaxation and mutual enjoyment.
Whereas, indirect speech
is always suffused
with some degree of
tension and apprehension.
In particular, cooperation theories
predict that indirect speech is of a piece
with a phenomenon of politeness,
a set of tactics by which we bridge gaps
in power or social distance.
But, in fact, a former
student of mine, James Lee,
now a professor at the
University of Minnesota,
and I, did some studies that showed
that the phenomenon of politeness
and the phenomenon of indirectness
are actually qualitatively different.
And I won't show you the data,
but I think just giving
you some of the examples
will show why they are different.
When you have a...
We described a number of
hypothetical scenarios
for our subjects and asked
them what form of speech
they feel would be most appropriate.
What would the character in the scenario
be most likely to say?
What would they be most likely to say?
And, indeed, in conformity
with theories of politeness,
when there is a big gap
in power and distance,
such as a junior worker
asking a senior worker
at a firm for help on a project,
indeed, many of the reflexes
of politeness were used.
But the speech was not indirect.
So for the preferred form
in which the request couched
would be something like,
"I'm really sorry to bother you, Dave.
"I wouldn't ask if this
wasn't hugely important to me.
"But do you think it might
be possible to help me
"with this analysis?"
There's a lot of cringing
and hedging and hesitation,
exactly what politeness
theory would predict.
But notice that the request
itself is blurted out.
"Do you think you could
help me with this analysis?"
An indirect speech act, such as,
"I really admire you, Dave.
"You have the perfect background for this.
"I wish someone would
have told me in school
"that this stuff would be
really invaluable in my work."
kind of beating around the bush,
was exactly not what people
thought was appropriate
in that setting.
In contrast,
when there is a fraught relationship,
such as a sexual come on,
then you get the opposite.
The preferred form of speech is indirect,
but it's not particularly polite.
So, for example, what seems
plausible in that context
would be Michael saying,
"It's been a really nice evening, Sarah.
"Would you like to come up to my apartment
"and see the great view?"
What he would not say
would be something like,
"I'm really sorry to
"bother you, Sarah.
(audience laughing)
"And I wouldn't ask if this
wasn't hugely importantly to me.
"But do you think that it
might be possible to have sex?"
(audience laughing)
So I hope that
will convince you that
politeness is a real phenomenon
but it is not the same as indirectness.
In trying to solve this puzzle,
I invoked what I considered
to be the fundamental
insight of evolutionary psychology,
which I attribute mainly
to Robert Trivers,
which is that all social
relationships involve mixtures
of cooperation and conflict.
There is no such thing as
a relationship that is purely cooperative
in the sense that the ultimate interest
of both parties are perfectly aligned,
and indeed that the complex,
coded nature of indirect speech
reflects exactly this tension.
Now indirect speech is more
than an academic puzzle.
It is also a topic in
linguistics with enormous
practical applications,
such as in the language of diplomacy.
Many diplomatic agreements,
such as UN Resolution 242,
which came in the wake of
the six day Arab-Israeli war
in 1967, are famously
notoriously indirect and vague.
And the parties have
been arguing ever since
over what the wording actually means.
The language of blackmail
is often framed in indirect speech.
One example came when a man approached
David Letterman a few years ago
with a screenplay about a
talk show host who was having an affair
with one of his staffers.
This man just offered to sell
the rights of the screenplay
to David Letterman.
Now, it so happened that at the time,
David Letterman was having an affair
with one of his staffers.
He interpreted this not
as an innocent offer
to buy the rights to a screenplay,
but as an act of blackmail.
Namely, pay off the guy and
he would keep this secret.
Bribery, many bribers are tendered
in indirect speech, not just in Fargo
and New Yorker cartoons, but in real life.
Again, I'll give you one example.
When the Equal Rights Amendment
was just a state short of ratification,
a lobbyist for the National
Organization of Women,
Wanda Brandstetter, handed
an Illinois congressman
a business card that said:
Your vote for $1,000 and
the support of the ERA.
And she was convicted
of attempting to bribe
a congressman and sentenced to 500 hours
of community service.
If she had tendered the same
bribe in different language,
using indirect speech, such as,
"As you know, Congressman,
organizations such as NOW
"tend to support candidates
whose positions are
"in harmony with our goals.
"And as you know, Congressman,
"one of our goals is passage
of the Equal Rights Amendment.
"And we are now considering whether to
"contribute $1000 to your campaign."
Then she would not have
been convictable in court.
And, finally, sexual harassment.
Those of you who remember the
Clarence Thomas confirmation
hearings remember the immortal line,
"Who put pubic hair on my Coke?"
which Clarence Thomas said to Anita Hill
when she was working for him in the office
of Equal Opportunity in
which she interpreted
as a sexual come on, and hence,
as an example of sexual harassment.
Now, note, by the way,
that all of these areas
in which indirect speech
has practical applications
are arenas of conflict.
And I think that is not a coincidence.
Well, here is a theory that
James Lee and Martin Nowak
and I have proposed to try
to make sense of this puzzle.
We call it The Theory of
the Strategic Speaker.
And I will first sum it up in a sentence
and then unpack each of the propositions
that make up a sentence.
The theory is that indirect
speech is rational strategy
to attain plausible
deniability of common knowledge
of relational models.
None of those mean anything
to you at this point,
but that is a preview of the
three parts of this talk.
Part one, plausible deniability.
The starting point in this analysis
is a game theoretic problem
called the identification problem,
first pointed out by Thomas Schelling
in his classic book, The
Strategy of Conflict.
Namely, how do you figure out
the rational course of action
when the outcome depends on
another intelligent agent
but you don't know the agent's values?
And as it happens, the
example that Schelling used
to illustrate this problem
was bribing a police officer.
So imagine a rational actor
pulled over by a policeman who is
considering two alternatives,
either offer a bribe to the
officer in so many words
or remaining silent.
Which of those two courses of action
brings the higher payoff?
Well, the answer is it depends.
It depends on what kind
of officer you're facing.
If you're dealing with
a dishonest officer,
he would accept the bribe
and you get the very
high payoff of going free
without a ticket.
Or in the case of Fargo,
without being arrested for kidnapping.
On the other hand, if you
have an honest officer,
and you tender the bribe,
then you could get arrested for the crime
of attempting to bribe an officer,
which carries a much greater cost
than the traffic ticket.
In contrast, if you remain silent
and don't bother offering a bribe at all,
then it doesn't matter what
kind of officer you're facing.
In either case,
you get the moderate
cost of a traffic ticket.
So in comparing the two options,
one of which has a
guaranteed moderate cost,
one of which has a high
payoff and a high cost,
it's not immediately apparent
which of these two is more attractive.
But now imagine that
there is a third option,
namely, a veiled bribe,
such as, "I was wondering
if there were some way
"of settling this without going to court
"and doing a lot of paperwork."
Well, now a dishonest officer
can sniff out the bribe
beneath the innuendo,
consummate the transaction.
You get the very high
payoff of going free.
An honest officer couldn't
make a bribery charge
stick in court by the standard of proof
beyond a reasonable doubt.
So he would have to let it pass
and the worst that you would end up with
is a traffic ticket.
So the veiled bribe
combines the high payoff
of bribing a dishonest officer
with a relatively small cost
of failing to bribe an honest officer
combined in a single option.
And so it is the rational choice.
Now Martin and James and I tried
to formalize this intuition
by calculating the average expected cost
of direct and direct bribes.
And it turns out a fairly
simple, game theoretic model
can give you this calculation.
It depends on proportion of
corrupt versus honest cops
in the population of policemen,
the cost of the ticket,
the cost of the bribe,
which has to be less than
the cost of the ticket
or else it would never pay to bribe.
The cost of an arrest for bribery,
which has to be worse
than the cost of a ticket,
otherwise it would always pay to bribe.
And, crucially, and this is
where linguistics come in,
the probability that a
cop will treat a statement
as an attempted bribe.
The result is that an indirect
bribe is the optimal strategy
if and only if the
threshold of explicitness
required for an honest
cop to arrest a driver
is greater than the threshold
of explicitness required
for a corrupt cop to accept a bribe.
Let me unpack that condition.
So, over here, you've got
the linguistic variable
of how naked the, versus tacit,
or implicit the bribe is,
going from perfectly innocent observation
all the way out to a naked
offer of a quid pro quo,
and which we assume
reflects the probability
that a hearer will interpret
the proposition as intended to be a bribe.
Over here, we have the expected cost.
Now it turns out that if there is a
continuous function relating
the explicitness of the proposition
to the probability that the
officer will interpret it as a bribe,
then for an honest cop,
here is the payoff.
Basically, the more explicit the bribe is,
the higher the cost,
because with an honest cop,
that just means he's more and more likely
to arrest your for bribery.
For a corrupt cop,
the more explicit the proposition,
the more likely he is to accept the bribe
and the lower the cost, that
is the higher the benefit.
So which is optimal?
Well, it only depends
then on the proportion
of honest and corrupt cops in
the population of policemen.
If there are more honest cops,
then the optimal strategy,
that is the one with the lowest cost
is just to keep your mouth
shut and don't say anything.
If there are more corrupt cops,
then the rational strategy is to
blurt out the bribe in so many words.
So in the case where you
have a continuous function
relating the probability of interpreting
and ambiguous proposition as a bribe,
indirect speech, in fact,
is not an optimal strategy.
The optimal strategy is either shut up
or offer the bribe in so many words,
depending only on the proportion of honest
and corrupt cops in a population.
So under these assumptions, in fact,
there is no rational reason
ever to use indirect speech.
Here's what makes it rational.
Imagine that there is a
non-linear relationship
between the explicitness of the bribe
and the likelihood that
it will be acted upon
as a bribe, in an extreme case,
a step-function, so that an honest cop
has a threshold that has
to be a certain degree
of explicitness before the honest cop
will whip out the handcuffs
and read you your rights.
Likewise, for a corrupt cop,
there is a discontinuity and critically
the corrupt cop's threshold is lower
than the honest cop's threshold.
And presumably, this assymetry
is due to the legal requirement that guilt
in a criminal proceeding be proven
beyond a reasonable doubt.
Well, this gap between the
corrupt cop's threshold
and the honest cop's threshold
means that the average payoff
shows a local minimum in this region of
intermediate explicitness in
which the costs are lowest,
meaning that it is optimal
for this rational speaker
to couch his proposition with a degree
of explicitness that falls
between those two thresholds.
So that's the model.
Another way of putting it
is that when you have different payoffs
with different hearers,
and different thresholds
for those hearers,
then you get a logic of what we
informally refer to as
plausible deniability.
So what I just shown you
is a kind of formalization
of the common sense notion
of plausible deniability.
Now, note, by the way, that this analysis,
even though it's, I hope,
it's fairly intuitive,
shows why pure cooperation
is not enough to explain indirect speech.
There is an inherent
role of conflict here.
Indirect speech is not being
used to help an honest officer
attain his goal, but rather
to confound or thwart him
in attaining this goal,
because the interest of the officer
and the interest of the driver
are not perfectly aligned.
And the critical prediction, recall,
is that there are different
thresholds for acting on
an ambiguous proposition
between the honest
and dishonest cops.
And, in fact, James and I
ran a number of experiments
in which we gave people
a set of propositions,
varying in explicitness,
ask them if they were an officer
or if they were expecting
an officer to act, at what
level in the continuum
would they expect them to act?
And, indeed, everyone agreed
that honest cops would
need a greater degree
of explicitness before making an arrest
than dishonest cops would
need in acting on a bribe.
Okay, that part seems
pretty straightforward.
But it leaves open the
question of why people
use indirect speech in
non-legal situations
when there are no financial or
legal payoffs and penalties.
It's not as if we
constantly live under the
threat of prosecution for our actions.
Why then do we still use
so much indirect speech
in every day life, such as
in everyday cases of bribery?
Now, you might react,
"Everyday cases of bribery?
"What do you mean?
"When would I, an honest,
upstanding law-abiding citizen
"ever be tempted to offer a bribe?"
Well, how's this?
You want to go to the
hottest restaurant in town,
you have no reservation.
Why not slip the maître d a $20 bill
in exchange for jumping the queue
and being seated immediately.
This is the assignment that
an editor at Gourmet magazine
gave the writer Bruce Feiler.
He dared him to try it
at Manhattan's most exclusive restaurants
on a Saturday night and
write up his experiences
for the readers of the magazine.
As a psychologist, I found this
article utterly fascinating.
First of all, despite the
fact that as far as I know
no one has ever been arrested
for the crime of attempting
to bribe a maître d'.
(audience laughing)
The assignment filled him with anxiety.
And I'm going to read to you
from the first paragraph
of the magazine article.
"I am nervous, truly nervous.
"As the taxi bounces through
the trendier neighborhoods
"of Manhattan, I keep
imagining the possible retorts
"of some incensed maître d'.
"'What kind of establishment
do you think this is?
"'How dare you insult me.
"'Do you think you can get in with that?'"
(audience laughing)
Second interesting
psychological phenomenon
displayed in this article
is that when Feiler did
screw up the courage
to offer the bribe, he
instinctively used indirect speech.
He folded up a $20 bill,
held it outside the line of
vision in peripheral vision
and he said to the maître d',
depending on the restaurant, things like,
"I hope you can fit us in.
"Can you speed up my wait?
"I was wondering if you
might have a cancellation."
So indirect speech really
does come naturally to us.
And the third interesting
part of the article
was the outcome, which is
that it worked every time.
(audience laughing)
He said, "We were seated in
between two and four minutes
"to the astonishment of my date."
So what's going on here?
What are the intangible costs
that drive people to indirect speech?
And here's a theory,
that the cost consists of
relationship mismatches.
In particular, that
human relationships fall
into a small number of types,
each of which has a rule
for distributing resources,
each has a distinct evolutionary
and neurobiological basis.
Each applies, by default,
to certain kinds of dyads,
contexts and resources.
In this theory of relationship types,
I have borrowed, maybe stolen,
from the anthropologist
Alan Fiske, who has worked
out this theory in detail.
And of the three natural
relationship types,
the first is dominance,
its rule for distributing
resources is don't mess with me,
the dominant individual
commandeers resources,
which are his prerogative.
Presumably they evolve from
the dominance hierarchies
that are ubiquitous among primates.
A very different relationship type
is communality or communal sharing,
whose rule for distributing resources
is what's mine is thine
what's thine is mine,
which presumably evolve via
mechanisms of kin selection
and mutualism, and which
are found by default
among biological kin between spouses
and among close intimate friends.
And reciprocity where the
rule is you scratch my back,
I'll scratch yours,
and follows the logic
of reciprocal altruism.
Now, critically, behavior that acceptable
when one relational model is enforced
can be anomalous in another.
For example, at a party, you might go over
to your boyfriend or
girlfriend or husband or wife
and help yourself to a
shrimp off their plate.
But you wouldn't go up to
your graduate supervisor
or your dean and help yourself
to a shrimp off his plate,
because what you can get
away with in a relationship
of communality, namely,
sharing without account,
you can't get away with in
a relationship of dominance.
Or if a good friend had you
over for a nice dinner party,
at the conclusion of the evening,
you wouldn't pull out your wallet
and try to pay him for
the cost of the meal,
because friendships obey
the rules of communality
and it would be inappropriate
to apply reciprocity.
Conversely, if you were at a restaurant,
you wouldn't go over to the owner and say,
"Oh, that was a great meal,
we had a really nice time
"and we'll have you back over sometime."
(audience laughing)
Now those are cases in
which the relational model
that's enforced is clear to both parties
and so any kind of breach
would be the subject
of comedy or amusement.
But there are cases in which
the relational model in force
can be ambiguous.
And in that case, any
divergent understanding
can lead to unpleasant emotion
for which we have a name, awkwardness.
For example, there can be
awkward moments in a workplace
in which a student doesn't
know whether they're ready to
address their advisor
on a first-name basis,
or they can invite them
out after work for a beer.
It's a well-known bit
of conventional wisdom
that close friends should never engage
in a business transaction,
such as one of them selling
his car to the other.
The very act of negotiating a price
can, a we say, put a
strain on the friendship,
because the rules of
reciprocity are appropriate to
neighbors or business
partners or coworkers,
but are not appropriate within the
dyad of a close friendship.
The possible clash
between a dominance model
and the communal sharing of sex,
such as when a supervisor solicits sex
from an employee or a student
leads to the infraction
of sexual harassment.
And even the clash between two different
kinds of communal relationship,
friendship or sex,
give rise to all of the tensions
and complexities of dating,
which are often worked
out for our amusement
in romantic comedies.
Well, this gives rise to a
social identification problem
in which the social cost of awkwardness
from a mismatched relationship type
can duplicate the payoff matrix
of a legal identification problem,
such as bribing a police officer.
So let's work out why it feels so nervous
to be given the assignment
of bribing a maître d'.
Now the key thing in bribing a maître d'
is that the maître d'
ordinarily wields a relationship
of authority over his restaurant fiefdom.
He's in charge, he seats people
where and when he pleases.
The act of offering a bribe
would change the relationship type
into obligating him to seat you at a table
in exchange for accepting the bribe.
So, again, let's start off
with the rational actor model
in which your only two options
are to tender a naked bribe
in so many words or not to bribe at all.
What is the optimal strategy?
Well, again, it depends
on whether you're facing
a corrupt maître d' who
would accept the bribe,
consummate a reciprocity relationship
and show you to a quick table
without any emotional costs.
On the other hand, you might be facing
a scrupulous maître d'
who would maintain his
dominance, rebuff the offer
of reciprocity by saying something like,
"How dare you insult me.
"Do you think you can get in with that?
"What kind of establishment
do you think this is?"
Giving rise to the high
emotional cost of awkwardness.
In contrast, if you just wait your turn
and show up and are happy to be seated
an hour and-a-half later, you are seeding
the dominance relationship
to the maître d',
but you pay the moderate
cost of a long wait.
So the high payoff of a quick table,
high emotional cost of awkwardness
have to be balanced against
the guaranteed moderate cost
of a long wait with no
emotional awkwardness.
However, if you had the third option,
such as, "I was wondering if
you might have a cancellation."
then, again, the corrupt maître d'
could sniff out the bribe
beneath the innuendo,
consummate a reciprocity relationship,
show you to a quick table.
A scrupulous maître d' could choose to let
the comment pass without
surrending his claim to being a
rational, sane, user of
the English language.
By letting it pass, he maintains
his dominance relationship.
You still have the long wait,
but you don't have the awkwardness.
And so the ambiguous bribe maintains the
high payoff of a quick table that you get
from bribing a corrupt maître d'
with the relatively small
cost of failing to bribe
a scrupulous maître d'
combined in one option.
And that is why the logic
of plausible deniability
applies not just to legal context
like bribing a cop, but to every day
context such as bribing a maître d'.
Okay, I promised that the
theory needed three parts.
And here is the third part.
There is still a problem with this theory,
which is why do people
resort to indirect speech
even when uncertainty is low or absent?
When there's no actual
identification problem,
because you can anticipate
tha tall listeners
have the same values to be concrete,
you now are in possession of the knowledge
that all Manhattan
maître d's are bribable.
Nonetheless, I suspect that if you ever
were to try to duplicate this stunt
and try to jump the
queue, you probably still
would use indirect speech
rather than blurting out your bribe
as a quid pro quo.
And, indeed, in our questionnaires
where we ask people,
"What kind of language
"would you use in these circumstances?"
Even when we tell people
100% of the cops are bribable
in this country that
you're driving through,
the corruption is so rampant
that it is guaranteed that
every cop will be bribable,
they still opted for indirect speech
as the preferred method
of addressing the officer.
Or in cases where there is no uncertainty
on the part of the hearer as
to what the speaker means.
It's hard to believe that any grown woman
would really be fooled by
the line about the etchings.
Nonetheless, I think you would agree
that there is something
that is much less awkward,
much more comfortable about the line,
"Would you like to see my etchings?"
than, "Would you like to
come up and have sex?"
So the deniability is really,
when it comes down to it,
not all that plausible.
As we say, it doesn't
pass the giggle test.
So why should a transparent
innuendo still feel
less awkward than an overture
that is, as we say, on the record.
I mentioned that some of these ambiguities
are the subject matter
of romantic comedies.
And I'll give you an example
from the romantic comedy
When Harry Met Sally that
illustrates this point.
At one point, the couple has
just met each other.
Each of them has another
boyfriend or girlfriend.
They're confined to a long car trip
and Harry makes a suggestion
that Sally interprets
as a come on.
And she accuses him,
"You're coming onto me"
And Harry says, "What do
you want me to do about it?
"I take it back, okay?
"I take it back."
She says, "You can't take it back."
He said, "Why not?"
She said, "Because it's
already out there."
Said, "Oh, geez, what
are we supposed to do?
"Call the cops?
"It's already out there."
So here's the puzzle.
What is going on when
we have the intuition
that an overture is out
there or on the record
that makes it so much worse
than a veiled overture that
is implicated indirectly,
even in cases where
there's no uncertainty,
real uncertainty, as to
what the overture means?
And our suggestion is
that the key difference
is a concept from economics,
semantics and game theory
called common knowledge,
which has to be distinguished
from shared knowledge.
Common knowledge is also
sometimes referred to
as mutual knowledge or common ground.
Now, in shared knowledge, A knows X,
and B knows X.
In common knowledge, A
knows X, and B knows X
and A knows that B knows X and B knows
that A knows X and A knows that B knows
that A knows X.
(audience laughing)
Ad infinitum.
Now this might seem implausible as a
psychological hypothesis,
because you can't fit an
infinite set of nested propositions
into a finite brain.
But as in other cases in linguistics
in which we attribute infinite
knowledge to a finite brain,
there's no paradox here,
because common knowledge
could be captured in a recursive formula,
formula that makes reference to itself.
Namely, X is common knowledge
if people share the proposition Y
where the proposition
Y is everyone knows X
and everyone knows Y.
Y being the proposition, everyone knows X
and everyone knows Y.
That can fit into a finite brain
and it summarizes in a formula
the whole set of infinite
nested propositions
without having to spell them out.
Also, common knowledge can
be ascertained perceptually
from the circumstances in
which X is transmitted.
You don't literally have to
have someone explain to you,
"Well, you see, he knows that she knows
"that he knows, that she knows."
And so on.
There's certain cases, such
as, which I will get to,
such a salient public signal
in which common knowledge can
be generated instantaneously.
Now the reason that common knowledge
has been of such interest to
economics and game theorists
is that it is
necessary to find equilibria
in coordination games.
Well, what does that mean?
Well, the original formulation
of a coordination game
comes from the philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
from his parable of the stag hunt.
Imagine that there are two hunters.
They set out each day
either to hunt rabbit,
a very small payoff or to hunt stag,
a large payoff.
The problem is while
each one, individually,
can catch a rabbit,
it takes the two of them working together
to fell a stag.
However, they have to decide
at the beginning of each day
which of the two quarry they aim for.
And they cannot communicate.
So why would a hunter decide
to go out and hunt stag?
Well, he has to be assured
that the other hunters
will also decide that
morning to hunt stag.
Why would they decide to hunt stag?
Well, they would only do
it if they thought that the
other hunters would do it.
But why would they think the
other hunters would do it?
Well, only if they thought
that the first one would do it,
ad infinitum.
In fact, any number of
embedded states of knowledge,
"I think that he knows
that I want to hunt stag.
"But I don't know that
he knows that I know,
"that he knows that I know it."
is rationally not sufficient to
make the decision to hunt stag.
The tragedy would be that each one of them
would settle for rabbit,
whereas if only they could
attain this common knowledge,
they would both be incentivized
to hunt stag together.
However, if there were some common signal,
if you raise a flag saying
"I'd like to hunt stag today"
and the other guy can see it and you know
that the other guy can see it,
that can solve the problem.
There are many examples
of coordination games
in every day life that are
solved by common knowledge.
Driving on the right or
the left side of the road,
there's no inherent advantage to driving
on the right side of the road
or the left side of the road,
but there is an advantage
to everyone driving
on the same side of the road.
In order, and it's not enough to think,
if you're in a country where
you don't know what side it is,
I think that the other guy's
gonna drive on the right,
because he may wanna drive on the right,
but he's not gonna do so
unless he thinks that everyone else
is also gonna drive on the right,
which means that when you have a country
that decides to switch sides,
such as Sweden did in 1969,
there has to be an enormous
amount of publicity
on when the switchover occurs.
I believe it was December
31st, midnight, 1969.
And that has to be so public
that not only do you know it
but you know that all of
your fellow citizens know it.
Paper currency, and other paper assets
are valuable to the extent that everyone
knows that everyone else
knows, that everyone else knows
that it's valuable.
Which means that when you have
threats to common knowledge,
As in hyper-inflation, bank
runs and speculative bubbles,
you can get the value of a
currency very quickly unraveling.
Political action.
Why is freedom of assembly
considered a fundamental right?
And why are dictators
the world over terrified
of the prospect of people
assembling peacefully?
Well, if you have a large population
that all is disgruntled with a tyrant,
then that is not enough
for them to take action,
because any one of them
standing up can be picked off.
All of them standing up simultaneously
would be too formidable a
force for the tyrant to ignore.
But people can't afford to stand up
unless they know that everyone else knows
that everyone else knows that
there's enough discontent
to motivate them all to stand up,
which is why showing up at a public place,
where not only are you carrying your signs
and yelling at the dictator,
but you see everyone else around you
also carrying the signs
and you know that they can
see you and see each other.
And that's what empowers
a crowd to challenge
the dominance of a dictator.
Nowadays, that can occasionally be done
not just by physical presence,
everyone seeing each other,
but by an electronic equivalent.
If everyone knows that a
message if posted on Twitter,
where everyone else can see it,
that can generate the
same common knowledge.
Now relational models,
that is whether the rules
in force, in a given dyad,
are authority, communality
or reciprocity are kind of
coordination equilibria.
You can kind of decide how
you're going to distribute the
shrimp or the money or
the sex without having to
squabble over it every time.
And so where both parties tacitly agree
on how to deal with
these common resources.
So the question is,
which I alluded to earlier,
how do people arrive at the
common knowledge necessary
to reach equilibria in coordination games.
Well, salient public events are
common knowledge generators.
And, perhaps, ny favorite
illustration of this
is the story of the emperors new clothes.
When the little boy cried out in public,
"The emperor has no clothes."
He wasn't telling anyone anything
that they didn't already know
anything they couldn't see
with their own eyeballs.
But, nonetheless,
he was changing the
state of their knowledge.
Because at that moment,
everyone knew that everyone else knew
that everyone else knew
that the emperor was naked.
He generated common knowledge.
And the common knowledge
empowered them to challenge
the dominance of the emperor.
The moral of story being
that direct speech, blurting something out
generates common knowledge.
And that leads, I submit,
to the third piece
of the puzzle of innuendo
and indirect speech.
Namely, indirect speech
provides shared knowledge.
Direct speech provides common knowledge.
And relationships, which are
a kind of coordination game
are maintained or nullified
by common knowledge
of the relationship type.
To be more concrete,
if Harry says to Sally,
"Would you like to come
up and see my etchings?"
And Sally says, "No."
Well, Sally knows that she has turned down
a sexual overture.
She's a grown woman, she's no fool.
Harry knows that she has
turned down a sexual overture,
he's no fool.
But does Sally know that Harry knows?
She could still wonder,
"Well, maybe Harry thinks that I'm naive."
And does Harry know that
Sally knows that he knows?
Harry could be wondering,
"Well, maybe Sally thinks I'm dense."
There's no common knowledge
and that allows them
to maintain the fiction
of a friendship.
The sexual overture can be rebuffed
and they could resume
their life as friends.
Whereas, if Harry were to have said,
"Would you like to come up and have sex?"
Well, now Harry knows that Sally knows
that Harry knows that Sally knows.
They cannot maintain the
fiction of a friendship.
And this is, we suggest,
what's behind that gut feeling
that with direct speech
you can't take it back.
It's out there.
Okay, this is what we hope
is a nice three-part theory.
Is there any evidence that it is true?
So James Lee and I tried to test it
by coming up with a number
of fictional scenarios.
In them, a speaker utters a proposition
that varies in level of directness.
That's our main independent variable.
We asked the subject to
put himself or herself
in either the speaker's
shoes or the hearer's shoes
and rate the likelihood
of various interpretations
of the proposition and
various emotional responses
as they imagine themselves
to be in that scenario.
We had a bribe scenario
where Kyle was pulled over for speeding.
And he says to the officer,
depending on the condition,
"I'm very sorry, officer.
"I really learned my lesson.
"From now on, you can be sure
that I'll be more careful."
With the $50 bill protruding.
That's a proposition that
is very vague and indirect.
One not more direct,
"I'm very sorry, officer.
"I know that I was speeding
and that I'll have to pay
"for my mistake.
"I'm very sorry, officer,
"but I'm actually in the
middle of something right now.
"Sort of an emergency.
"So maybe the best thing would
be to take care of this here
"without going to court or
doing a lot of paperwork."
And, finally, "I'm very sorry, officer.
"If I give you a 50 will
you just let me go?"
(audience laughing)
You have seduction scenario.
Michael and Lisa are
coworkers and good friends,
have a nice dinner,
Michael drives Lisa home.
When passing his apartment, he says,
"Wow, I feel like we've
been talking so much.
"But it's only 10:30."
or, "My friend just
emailed me those pictures
"from our trip to Europe
that I was telling you about.
"Do you wanna come over and have a look?"
Or, "You know, I have
a really terrific view
"from my balcony.
"You can see the whole city,
the lights, the oceans.
"Would you like to come
over and have a look?"
or, "I find you really attractive
"and I enjoyed being
with you tonight a lot.
"Would you like to come
over and have sex?"
So that was the bluntness
continuum in the seduction scenario.
Then we also had a threat scenario,
where an unscrupulous professor
threatens a student with
a loss of a fellowship
if she doesn't work in his lab.
So I mentioned the theory
comes in three parts.
Here are some tests of
each of the three parts.
The first one and the most basic one
speaks to the notion of
plausible deniability.
Namely, does the linguistic
variable of directness
or indirectness actually correspond
to a continuum of probability
of the listener giving
various interpretations
to the proposition.
This is, is indirect speech
just a social ritual,
like please or thank you.
Or is it an uncertainty generator
about the speaker's intent.
That was pretty easy to test.
In these various
scenarios, we asked people
"Does the hearer
understand what the speaker
"really means?"
Namely, interpreting as a
bribe, a threat or a come on.
The X axis is how overt
the proposition was.
Perhaps, not surprisingly,
with overt speech.
100% of the subjects deemed
it to be 100% certain
that it was a bribe, threat or come on,
and with varying degrees of indirectness,
the likelihood that it
was interpreted as a bribe
fell accordingly.
Prediction number two
is that indirect speech
should be perceived as less
likely to get the speaker
into legal trouble,
such as being found
guilty in a bribery trial
or subject to a disciplinary hearing
if the student blew the
whistle on the professor.
And, once again, that is
very much the perception
of people as the imagine
themselves in the scenario.
That is, for example,
if the driver went on trial for bribery,
how likely is it that
he would be convicted?
And, indeed, people thought
it was a near certainty
when the bribe was an overt quid pro quo
and succeedingly less
likely as it was veiled
in thicker and thicker innuendo.
Prediction three is that the appeal
of the direct speech should
depend on the payoff matrix.
That is, speakers should
be a kind of rational actor
in calibrating the
optimal level of vagueness
to the payoff structure of the situation.
In particular, as the model predicted,
a direct bribe
was rated as more attractive
relative to an indirect bribe
when there were fewer honest cops,
that is 10% versus 90%.
The fine for bribery was
lower, 250 versus $10,000.
The cost of the ticket was
higher, $2,000 versus $200,
or the cost of the bribe was lower, $20
as the going rate to
bribe a cop versus $100.
In fact, here you see
the predicted directness
according to the payoff structure
that we varied across scenarios.
And the Y axis shows the actual
degree of directness that
subjects judged to be
most likely in this situation.
Okay, part two, relationship negotiation.
Prediction is that indirect speech
should be seen as more respectful
and better acknowledging
the expected relationship
with the hearer, namely, affection
in the case of communality,
deference in the case of authority,
collegiality, also
communality relationship.
That is, that there should
be the emotional payoff
that the theory predicts.
So this is in the bribe
scenario, for example.
How well did Kyle convey
deference to the authority?
It was judged that with overt speech,
Kyle was not being differential at all.
The vaguer the speech, the more deference
they thought Kyle was showing
to the police officer.
Likewise, how affectionate
was Michael toward Lisa?
Blurting out a sexual proposition
was considered to be not
particularly affectionate,
whereas being very vague
was judged as considerate
to her feelings.
Prediction number two,
and this is a crucial one,
is that just as in the case
of the dollars and sense
calculation for bribing a police officer,
it's critical if you take the
fairly unromantic attitude
that indirect speech is a strategy
that maximizes expected payoffs.
It's only optimal if there
are differing thresholds
between a willing hearer
and an unwilling hearer.
We show that that was true
for the police officer
and we had the principle of proving guilt
beyond a reasonable doubt
as a kind of backup.
The question is, in every day life,
in social situations,
which are unregulated,
do we abide by a kind of proof of guilt
beyond a reasonable doubt
when interpreting ambiguous propositions?
In particular, imagine
two different hearers
for a sexual proposition.
One of whom is an unwilling seductee,
she has no interest in
a sexual relationship.
How explicit does a sexual
proposition have to be
before she explicitly rebuffs it,
versus if she wants to
reciprocate his sexual intentions,
how explicit does his
proposition have to be
before she accepts it?
And the answer is that for a
unwilling hearer to take offense,
the sexual advance has
to be much more explicit
than for a willing hearer
to accept the proposition.
That is, an unwilling hearer
gives the speaker a certain
amount of benefit of the doubt
before calling on him,
whereas a willing hearer will
act with a much gentler hint.
And it is exactly that asymmetry
that is necessary in the model
for indirectness to be
the optimal strategy.
Finally, and this is the
hardest part to test,
that direct speech, the
proposition, the direct speech,
but not indirect speech is perceived
to generate common knowledge.
And we tried to test
this, at least at first,
in a very explicit manner
by actually asking people
to put themselves in the situation
of say Michael and Lisa,
and to assess what they would
guess about the other party's
state of knowledge and the
other party's state of knowledge
about their state of knowledge.
And here's how we tried to do it.
Since a set of nested propositions,
of he knows that she knows
that he knows that she knows
can make you dizzy very quickly.
We tried to lead them through
to these states of knowledge
in small baby steps.
So put yourself in Lisa's position.
What is Lisa thinking at this point
following the proposition from Michael
varying in degree of explicitness?
We gave them a rating scale
from "I'm absolutely certain
"that Michael was not
asking me to have sex/
"I'm virtually certain,
"I think he probably wasn't asking me.
"Did he just ask me to have sex
"or was he just asking
me to stay out longer?
"I think he was probably
asking me to have sex.
"I'm virtually certain he was asking me.
"I'm absolutely certain."
So that was the rating scale.
Now this is for the first order hearer,
namely, the hearer judging
the intention of the speaker.
Second order, now imagine
that Lisa has politely said
she wants to go home.
Put yourself in Michael's position.
What is Michael thinking now?
"I'm certain that Lisa did not understand
"that I was asking her for sex.
"I'm absolutely certain
that she understood."
And all of the gradations in between.
We also asked then the state,
the second order knowledge,
on the part of the hearer.
Lisa knows that Michael
is asking her to have sex.
Now put her, yourself, in her position.
What is she thinking?
"Michael thinks I didn't understand
"he was asking me to have sex.
"I'm absolutely certain of that."
Again, with a set of statements
varying in certainty,
the other end of the
continuum being "Michael knows
"that I understood he was
asking me to have sex.
"I'm absolutely certain of that."
And through comprehension
questions after the fact,
we had pretty good confidence
that people were able to follow us.
And we pushed our luck
with the third order speaker knowledge.
(audience member laughing)
Suppose that Michael
does realize that Lisa knowingly
turned down his invitation
to have sex.
Put yourself in Michael's position.
What is he thinking?
One end of the continuum,
"Lisa thinks that I didn't understand
"that she turned me down for sex.
"I'm certain of that."
to, "Lisa knows that I understood
"that she turned me down for sex.
"I'm absolutely certain of that."
And then the third order
hearer state of knowledge.
Suppose Lisa is certain that Michael knows
she turned down his
invitation to have sex.
Put yourself in Lisa's position.
What is she thinking?
A set of options.
"Michael understands that
I turned him down for sex.
"But he doesn't realize that
I know he understands that."
Other end, "Michael understands
"that I turned him down for sex.
"And he realizes I know
he understands that."
Okay, here are the results as a function
of the degree of explicitness
of the proposition.
This time, however, I'm
plotting it as the parameter.
Rather, that is the
difference between the lines
rather than the X axis.
So this line is for a
proposition that is blurted out.
This one for one that is nearly overt,
indirect and very vague.
And on the X axis, we have
the degree of embedding
of states of knowledge.
That is, what did he actually mean?
What does she think he means?
What does he understand as
far as her understanding
of what he means, and so on?
For all of the indirect speech acts,
the more deeply embedded
the proposition is,
the less and less certain
the person imagines
the actor in the scenario to be.
So even if they think it's pretty likely
that it was a sexual come on.
They're not so sure that he thinks
that she thinks that he thinks
that it was sexual come on.
However, when it is blurted
out in so many words,
the certainty is pinned at 100%.
No matter how many levels of embedding
of he says that she say,
he thinks that she thinks,
that he thinks that she
thinks, you throw at people,
they are always confident
that everyone knows
with complete certainty
that it was a sexual come on
when it is said directly
but not indirectly.
So to sum up, innuendo,
that is polite requests,
veiled threats and bribes
and sexual overtures,
poses a puzzle for psycholinguistics.
And I have offered a
solution in three parts.
Plausible deniability,
namely, indirect speech
can minimize expected costs
in identification problems,
when a speaker does not
a know a hearer's values.
Relationship negotiation,
there are emotional costs
to mismatched relationship types.
So we seek plausible deniability
when exploring relationship changes.
And common knowledge,
indirect speech is used
even when deniability is not so plausible,
because direct speech
generates common knowledge,
which is the basis for coordinating
relationship types.
Another way of putting it is that
plausible deniability of
common knowledge is possible
even when plausible deniability
of the first order meaning is not.
So some final thoughts
on common knowledge.
I believe that innuendo
is a window into a much broader world
of human social interaction.
That is, it's part of
a family of phenomena
in which we differentiate
shared knowledge from common knowledge,
even though we don't, of course,
have the explicit vocabulary to do so,
we all tacitly sense that
there is an enormous difference
between something that everyone knows
and something that everyone
knows that everyone knows.
And that that is, I will throw these out
without explaining why, that
I think that that is behind
phenomena such as hypocrisy, piety,
tact, taboo, conventional wisdom,
mock outrage, the
so-called Washington gaffe,
which is what is the definition
of a gaffe in Washington?
That's when a politician
says something that is true.
(audience laughing)
And political correctness.
Now how could it be that so
many emotional fraught phenomena
are governed by a
phenomenon, common knowledge,
for which we don't have an everyday name.
You don't have people
explicitly talk about common knowledge.
Well, I suggest that we do talk about it.
And, again, I will give a shout
out to a Berkeley linguist.
George Lakoff has famously argued
that much of our language is suffused with
conceptual metaphors,
that is families of tropes
all built around a common
image, which capture
a common understanding of
an abstract phenomenon.
And I think we do have a
set of every day idioms
and figures of speech
that indirectly refer
to the phenomenon of common knowledge
by eluding to the image of a
conspicuous object or sound.
And any idiom that makes such an elusion
is a little indicator
that we have a tacit sense
of the difference between common knowledge
and shared knowledge,
such as, of course, the
emperor's new clothes,
phototypically, it's out there,
as in When Harry Met Sally,
the cat is out of the bag,
the bell can't be unrung.
Fans of Seinfeld may remember the episode
in which George says to
a woman he's been dating,
"I love you."
And she doesn't respond.
And Jerry says,
"That's a pretty big matzo
ball hanging out there."
(audience laughing)
And, of course, the elephant in the room,
the title of this lecture.
And with that, I will stop
and take your questions.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauding)
- [Andrew] Thank you,
Steve, for a wonderful talk.
If you want to ask a question,
I'm sure many people do,
make them questions and make them brief
and line up here at the mic.
- [Audience Member] Do
you see any difference
in indirect speech in someone who's
offering a bribe as part
of soliciting a bribe
for a cop who is wanting to get the $50
as opposed to the motorist who
isn't sure that he should give it or not.
- Yes, so it is soliciting a bribe also
not in indirect speech.
So that we have not varied that.
We haven't given people the scenario
in which a corrupt
offers solicits a bribe.
But I suspect that much of that
is not in indirect speech
as well, anecdotally,
based on both on
accounts that I've read
of corrupt politicians
who solicit bribes,
often in indirect speech,
like we're looking for contributions
to our campaign fund.
On experiences with people
encountering bureaucrats
and cops in countries that
are rife with corruption,
that, "Would you like
to make a contribution
"to the policeman's
Benevolent Association?"
As opposed to, "Give
me some money or I will
"make your life miserable."
This is not to deny that there are cases
in which bribes are actually
extorted in so many words.
But I suspect that as you hinted,
there's a lot of indirect
speech there as well.
- [Audience Member] Thank
you for a great talk.
So I just wanted to ask a question
about the model you presented.
You talked about the sort
of critical importance
of that step function
versus a linear function.
- Yeah, it could be--
- Sorry, not--
- It could be a signal.
- [Audience Member] Right, any
sort of non-linear (mumbles).
And I'm just wondering--
- Yeah.
- [Audience Member] Just
wondering if you've thought about
sort of ways you could
empirically test that
if you've actually looked at
experiments that you could look
for a sort of threshold
effect versus just a linear
or a non-linear.
- Yes, you certainly could.
We tried to do so.
The problem is our scatter of points
where plotted perceived likelihood
of acting on the proposition as a bribe
as a function of linguistic directness,
measured independently,
the points were orderly enough for us to
claim with a high degree of confidence
that there was a non-linearity.
But you're right that that would be
a good test of the model.
And if we ran 10 times as many subjects,
and had many more levels of indirectness
between naked bribe and innocent remark,
we'd be in a position to test that.
But, yes, absolutely,
that would be a good test.
- [Audience Member] I've seen
some studies that point to
creativity as being
related with dishonesty.
So, in other words, people who are
primed to be dishonest tend
to find creative solutions
to a problem more easily.
And I was wondering if
there might be a similar relationship
with tendency to use innuendo
versus direct speech.
And sort of as a follow on to that,
whether innuendo might...
I haven't really got my
head around the problem yet,
but I'm just wondering
whether it would lead to
a feeling of greater cognitive ease
or greater cognitive strain.
I'm thinking cognitive
ease, but I don't know.
- Yes, no, I think those
are insightful observations.
In every day life, we often have a feeling
in making judgements about
individual differences,
that there's a kind of person who is
perhaps a master at indirect speech.
At one extreme they can be seen as slick
or fast talking or oleaginous.
And we distrust someone
who's slick, too unctuous,
too fulsome, where you never
know what they're thinking.
One step short of that, we
value someone who is tactful,
which I interpret as
keeping fraught propositions
out of common knowledge.
The distinction between being tactful
and being unctuous or
slick is often a fine one.
Then at the other end, we
sometimes denigrate
people who are too blunt.
They can come off as boorish or uncultured
or tactless.
But then we can also value someone
who's kind of plain speaking,
who can, at least in some circumstances,
just get to the point.
And as you note in the
second part of your question,
there can be a lot of cognitive work
when we figure, "What did
he really mean by that?"
and you go home just wondering,
"Well, how should I interpret that?"
Which is a kind of imposition,
a kind of lack of consideration.
I sense, and I think
you can all confirm this
that a lot of our gossip of
what kind of a person someone is
is often how they fit
along those two dimensions.
Do they have an optimal degree
of tact without being slick?
Do they have a refreshing
directness without being insulting
and boorish?
And I bet a content analysis
of a lot of our conversation
would show us pinning
people in that space.
- [Audience Member] Yeah, I just think
sort of a direction for
future research might be
trying to pinpoint sort of an optimal
number of levels of ambiguity
for, yeah, anyway.
- Absolutely, and I think people,
here's another everyday concept
that I think relates to that,
is when we talk about someone
who's being socially skilled
versus graceless clumsy,
I think a lot of it is
finding the optimum degree
of indirectness so that
a message gets across
without anyone's feelings being hurt,
without their, as we say,
their feathers being ruffled,
their nose being put out of joint.
And because in social
life you can't get away,
you know, we can't all
cooperate perfectly on everything.
There are inherent conflicts of interest
in running any organization,
or for that matter,
family, friendship, romantic partnership.
And being able to
negotiate those conflicts
without challenging the relationship
that is, say, treating someone as a peon
when they should be your peer.
But you still really have to
direct them to do something.
Or challenge someone while making it clear
you're still their friend,
you still love them.
That's the very stuff of
dealing with relationships.
And I think the socially
skilled person is the one
who finds that optimal level.
- [Audience Member] Thank you very much
for a very interesting talk.
Well, I have a very short question
concerning all the seduction
scenario you were talking about
in your lecture.
So in linguistics we know
that euphemisms are used
when there is a taboo for something.
So there is a concept that is
perceived as being unpleasant.
And we know that sexuality
is obviously a taboo concept.
So my question is do we
actually have a choice
between directness and indirectness
in that seduction scenario?
We can, of course, be pretty direct,
but this will create the
impression that we are not
well brought-up or not
brought up in a proper manner.
Yeah, how will you relate this well
to your theory of the
decision between directness
and indirectness.
- Well, I think that that's right.
What in effect I've been trying to do
is to come up with a theory
of what taboo really is,
why you do have the impression
that someone is better
brought up if they find the
right level of indirectness
instead of just blurting everything out.
And it's not mandatory.
There are people, I suspect
there are people in this room
who've had the experience of
someone just blurting out,
"You know, I find you really attractive.
"Do you wanna have sex?"
which I've read interviews with authors
who are famous for just trying it.
And if they get rejected
19 times out of 20,
well, it's worth it to score on the 20th.
And so if they have a thick enough skin
to withstand the rejection
and the offense because it's worth it,
then they really do opt
for more direct speech.
And then on the other end,
again, I'm gonna appeal to Seinfeld,
not 'cause I'm a Seinfeld fanboy, per se,
but because romantic comedies
and situation comedies
are often driven by exactly
these sorts of conflicts.
But in the other
direction, from the author
who just blurts it out every time
with a thick skin for rejection,
you got a scene where George Constanza
is asked by his date
at the end of the date,
"Would you like to come up for coffee?"
And he says, "Oh, no, I have to be at work
"at nine in the morning and
caffeine would keep me up."
And then walking away he says,
"Oh, my God, coffee doesn't mean coffee.
"Coffee means sex."
(audience laughing)
So that's the danger
with being too indirect.
So I think there is, there
still exists that range.
And I think most people do
find some intermediate point.
But that is a range of options
that is available to people.
- [Audience Member] Hi, whoo.
Hi, so I'm wondering if there are,
if you've identified any linguistic cues
for kind of the opposite.
As opposed to understanding
indirect speech, what if someone is
trying to be direct but
then they are misunderstood
as having tried to convey
an innuendo or a euphemism.
And what factors might cause
the hearer to think that,
factors within the speakers speech?
- Yes, well, our data suggests
that when you're direct,
at least by our definition of directness,
which we confirmed with ratings by
separate groups of subjects.
Almost my by definition,
direct leaves very little room
to the imagination.
Now there are...
There are cases and they're
also subject to comedy
where you've got the really dense person
who doesn't understand something
that's even very obvious.
There's the joke about
the two psychiatrist.
And one of them says to the
other, "Have a nice day."
and the other things, "I
wonder what he meant by that?"
(audience laughing)
Or, "Do you wanna come up and have sex?"
"Oh, what could he possibly mean?"
So I think those are the subject
of another kind of comedy.
But, generally, directness
is harder to misinterpret.
- Can I clarify a little bit?
- You've got an example?
- [Audience Member] Like,
for example, in a situation
where you, well, okay.
So in the situation where
it's very common for women to say, "No."
to sexual overtures, but it's interpreted
as being playing hard to get.
Thank kind of thing.
- Oh, I see.
What part of no don't you--
- So it's like this idea
of that, you're like
playing a game or something.
Or for someone to say, like,
"I want to be friends with you."
And that being like,
"Oh, she wants to get friendly with me."
(audience laughing)
- That's right
No, that's true.
And that actually is a
significant phenomenon in
cases of sexual harassment of
acquaintance rape and so on.
And in workplace policies.
A few years ago, I remember
Safeway supermarkets,
instructed their cashiers,
with every customer
look them in the eye and smile,
as a way of making Safeway seem to be
a nice, friendly place.
And they had to abandon that policy,
because the male
customers interpreted that
as a sexual come on
(audience laughing)
by the female cashiers.
And there are lots of
data that the threshold,
there's a whole sexual
asymmetry in sexual come ons
that the way a male reacts
to a female proposition
and vice versa show enormous asymmetries.
And you're right that there can be,
and because of things like,
"What part of no don't you understand?"
The threshold can be...
So that would be a good example.
The threshold can be
set so far to the right that
that would be a case, indeed,
that where direct speech
is interpreted as a indirect speech.
And, presumably, this
would be explained, again,
by the payoff matrix
for a man for whom sex
has such a high payoff
and being turned down
has such a low cast,
then the optimum cutoff
could be one in which nothing
short of physical resistance
would be interpreted as a genuine no.
So, yeah, that's a great example.
- [Audience Member] Thank you.
- [Audience Member] My question
is a little bit related.
It seems like a lot of these scenarios
could be interpreted, in some cases,
as being part of a broader
bargaining scenario.
And I was wondering have you, do you
also look into sort of
at what point people
perceive something as
part of a negotiation.
And at what point it's simply a yes or no?
- No, I think that these are
(mumbles) of negotiation.
And in negotiation...
Negotiation is a coordination problem
in the sense that there is
a often a range of solutions
that would leave both sides better off
than if they walked away from the deal
and each one wants to
find the optimal point
within that range of solutions.
And, often, common knowledge
of a salient solution
is essential to consummating
an effect of negotiation.
And so that range of
intermediate positions
is usually what is being
explored in a negotiation.
And I think that's true of
a negotiating a relationship
as well as negotiating a price.
So, yeah.
- [Audience Member] Thank you.
- [Audience Member]
Thanks for a great talk.
So, two things.
First, I wanted to
thank you for explaining
my lack of success with American women.
(Steven and audience laughing)
Secondly, I thought it
was interesting that...
So you primarily you focused
on the cost and benefits
to the speaker of making shared
knowledge common knowledge.
And it seems like there's
an interesting angle
to looking at the same thing
from the perspective of the hearer.
And just to give an example that, say,
in the case of the corrupt police officer,
there may be costs to the police officer
of explicitly appearing corrupt.
In the sense, for example,
the police officer
may be subject to disciplinary sanctions
if it's clear in the transaction,
the police officer is corrupt.
And then, I guess, similarly in the case
of the dating scenario, the women's morals
may be called into question.
If it's explicit that she easily accepts
the sexual invitation,
so I'm just curious if
you've looked at that
cost-benefit equation
from the perspective of the
hearer as well as the speaker.
- Yes, although not experimentally.
But I do explore exactly
that question in my book
The Stuff of Thought, from which
a lot of this material is taken.
And, indeed, a fact that I just threw out
without a lot of justification,
namely that there are different thresholds
for the speaker and the hearer
as to how direct the proposition has to be
before they'll act on it.
Would itself need an explanation?
And, indeed, the explanation would
come form the payoff matrix
for the hearer.
That is, what are the
costs, the potential costs,
of accepting versus turning
down the proposition.
And because those
payoffs will be different
for the hearer then for the
speaker, that would result
in the threshold for action,
showing the discrepancy
that is absolutely necessary
for indirect speech to be selected.
That's probably why in cases where
the payoffs are pretty much identical
for speaker and hearer.
That's when it's just fine
to kinda blurt it out.
You don't need a lot of indirect speech
and beating around the bush
in a married couple, when it comes to sex,
in a business transaction where
you're actually buying
something from a vendor
where everyone benefits to a known degree
by the transaction,
then you don't have that
slippage between the two sets of interests
that define the zone in which
indirectness is optimal.
Yes, that's absolutely right.
And for the...
There's the built-in
asymmetry of male sexuality
and female sexuality.
In fact, the extreme case
is the famous experiment
by Elaine Hatfield in which she...
This is actually a wonderful experiment on
direct speech where she hired confederates
to walk around campus,
select a member of the opposite sex
and say, "Would you like to
have sex with me tonight?"
And what she found was that
75% of the men said yes.
And 0% of the women said yes.
(audience laughing)
And I think there are perfectly
well-supported explanations
from evolutionary psychology
on why that should be true.
So there's that.
And that's, by the way,
one of the reasons why
I didn't make any of these
scenarios gender neutral.
When it comes to sexuality
it's just not gender neutral.
But, in addition, there
are probably some payoffs
that are inherently symmetrical
on two sides, such as if, on either side,
if you are rebuffed,
that is a kind of denigration
of your attractiveness
and that works for both,
superimposed on a male/female difference,
that's an aspect that's the same
for male and female,
that kind of pride insulting.
And there are other aspects
that could be more or less symmetrical.
- [Audience Member] Yeah, thanks.
Or, I guess you could say, in other words,
the type of relationship to some degree
dictates whether the speaker
needs to take into consideration
the cost benefits of the
hearer as well as their own.
- Yes, very much so, yeah.
- [Audience Member] Hi, my
question was kind of related.
So your example, most of
your examples in this talk,
have been about the
initial sort of overture,
the initial question, like
the veiled offer of a bribe,
or the veiled offer of sex.
But if you, encounter a corrupt cop
or a willing sexual partner,
it eventually has to like
cross those degrees of indirectness
up to the point where you
actually hand over the 50
or actually have sex.
So I was wondering if you
had conducted research
or were planning to
conduct research on how
and under what conditions that
step up of ambiguity reaches
the level of full directness.
- Yes, and we do discuss that scenario,
Martin and James and I in our PNAS paper
although we never designed
an experiment around it.
But, yes, one other
strategy, which is in fact,
as you suggest, more realistic
than you throw at a proposition
gambling on how your
speaker will react to it,
giving it your best shot.
Is that you could escalate
the degree of directness.
"Gee, officer, isn't it a nice day?
"Gee, I guess you do have a
problem with speeders here.
"I can understand how you'd
be concerned about this.
"I've heard that policemen
have Benevolent Association.
"How is doing lately?"
(audience laughing)
You could up and up and up it.
And, likewise, I don't even
have to play it out for you
what it would be like
in a seduction scenario,
likewise in a threat scenario.
And that way the speaker
could calibrate the degree,
could sort of titrate
the degree of directness
until they get the first
signs of a rejection
or the deal is consummated.
And I agree with you that in real life,
that incremental strategy,
moving your way up the line
of explicitness may even be more common
than throwing out your best guess
as a one-shot offer.
- [Audience Member] With respect to
the interests of the hearer,
a corrupt cop might
want to accept a bribe,
but might test out and just
make it a little bit more
explicit than the offer of the bribe,
waiting for them to offer
an even more explicit bribe
so that at every given point,
the level of ambiguity's
comfortable for everyone.
Is that kind of--
- Absolutely, yes, so it could be.
And because as in response
to an earlier question I mentioned
that soliciting a bribe
also uses indirectness
and, indeed, that could be
done incrementally as well.
And so you could have,
and I suspect, again,
probably a lot of romantic
comedies explore this
in the sexual case.
Probably a set of potentially escalating
propositions in both
directions could at some point
meet in the middle.
I think much ado about nothing,
the sexually charged banter
has much of that character,
also in Henry V, the (speaks a
foreign language) at the end.
- [Andrew] So let's thank
Steve, again, for a great talk.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you very much.
Thank you.
(gentle thoughtful music)
