{"pk":26528,"title":"Talking with tact: Polite language as a balance between kindness and informativity","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Conveying information in a false or indirect manner in consid-eration of listeners’ wants (i.e. being polite) seemingly contra-dicts an important goal of a cooperative speaker: informationtransfer. We propose that a cooperative speaker considers bothepistemic utility, or utility of providing the listener new and ac-curate information, and social utility, or utility of maintainingor boosting the listener’s self-image (being polite). We for-malize this tradeoff within a probabilistic model of languageunderstanding and test it with empirical data on people’s infer-ences about the relation between a speaker’s goals, utterancesand the true states of the world.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Politeness; computational modeling; communica-tive goals; pragmatics"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6dm139m8","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Erica","middle_name":"J.","last_name":"Yoon","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"Henry","last_name":"Tessler","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Noah","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Goodman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Frank","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26528/galley/16164/download/"}]}