- Oxford Library of Psychology
- [UNTITLED]
- Oxford Library of Psychology
- About the Editor
- Contributors
- Language and Social Psychology: Introduction and Overview
- Language Attitudes: Social Determinants and Consequences of Language Variation
- Language, Identity, and Culture: Multiple Identity-Based Perspectives
- Language and Culture
- Gender Similarities and Differences in Language
- Working Together
- Perspective Taking and Its Impostors in Language Use: Four Patterns of Deception
- Hand and Facial Gestures in Conversational Interaction
- Interactive Alignment and Language Use
- Cognitive and Social Aspects of Coherence
- Shaping Intergroup Relations Through Language
- Language, Style, and Persuasion
- Language and Interpersonal Relationships
- Natural Language Use as a Marker of Personality
- Using Computerized Text Analysis to Track Social Processes
- Language and Social Comprehension
- Language and Attribution: Implicit Causal and Dispositional Information Contained in Words
- Me and My Stories
- The Role of Language on the Perception and Experience of Emotion
- Discursive Social Psychology
- Grounding Language in Our Bodies and the World
- Literal Versus Nonliteral Language: Novelty Matters
- Intentions in Meaningful Experiences of Language
- Electrophysiological Research on Conversation and Discourse Processing
- Politeness and Reasoning: Face, Connectives, and Quantifiers
- Language Variation in the Classroom
- Pragmatic Processes in Survey Interviewing
- Language and the Law: Illustrations from Cases of Disputed Sexual Consent
- The Role of Language in Conflict and Conflict Resolution
- Computer-Mediated Communication
- The Role of Natural Language and Discourse Processing in Advanced Tutoring Systems
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
Connectives and quantifiers are the building blocks of judgment and reasoning. Pragmatic factors affect their interpretation, which in turn affects inferences and decisions. To account for these effects, the psychology of judgment and reasoning imported theoretical frameworks from linguistic pragmatics. These frameworks focused on conversational efficiency but neglected politeness. Efficiency can explain a large range of interpretative effects (e.g., the scalarity of “some” and “or,” the narrow range of numerical translations for verbal uncertainty terms, the propagation of uncertainty from antecedent to consequent in conditional reasoning), but it does not explain the interpretation of connectives and quantifiers that apply to face-threatening content such as criticisms, requests, impositions, or bad news. When face-threatening content is involved, efficiency and politeness are antagonistic, and classic efficiency effects disappear for politeness reasons. Thus, politeness explains why people sometimes revert to the logical interpretation of “some” and “or,” why they assign greater probability to severe events, and why they sometimes cancel causal inferences.
Keywords: politeness, reasoning, pragmatics, connectives, quantifiers
Jean-François Bonnefon is a French behavioral scientist working at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the director of the CLLE research center in Toulouse.
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- Oxford Library of Psychology
- [UNTITLED]
- Oxford Library of Psychology
- About the Editor
- Contributors
- Language and Social Psychology: Introduction and Overview
- Language Attitudes: Social Determinants and Consequences of Language Variation
- Language, Identity, and Culture: Multiple Identity-Based Perspectives
- Language and Culture
- Gender Similarities and Differences in Language
- Working Together
- Perspective Taking and Its Impostors in Language Use: Four Patterns of Deception
- Hand and Facial Gestures in Conversational Interaction
- Interactive Alignment and Language Use
- Cognitive and Social Aspects of Coherence
- Shaping Intergroup Relations Through Language
- Language, Style, and Persuasion
- Language and Interpersonal Relationships
- Natural Language Use as a Marker of Personality
- Using Computerized Text Analysis to Track Social Processes
- Language and Social Comprehension
- Language and Attribution: Implicit Causal and Dispositional Information Contained in Words
- Me and My Stories
- The Role of Language on the Perception and Experience of Emotion
- Discursive Social Psychology
- Grounding Language in Our Bodies and the World
- Literal Versus Nonliteral Language: Novelty Matters
- Intentions in Meaningful Experiences of Language
- Electrophysiological Research on Conversation and Discourse Processing
- Politeness and Reasoning: Face, Connectives, and Quantifiers
- Language Variation in the Classroom
- Pragmatic Processes in Survey Interviewing
- Language and the Law: Illustrations from Cases of Disputed Sexual Consent
- The Role of Language in Conflict and Conflict Resolution
- Computer-Mediated Communication
- The Role of Natural Language and Discourse Processing in Advanced Tutoring Systems
- Index
