{"pk":28763,"title":"Uncertain evidence statements and guilt perceptionin iterative reproductions of crime stories","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Transmission of information by means of language is a po-tentially lossy process. Especially adjunct information, suchas the graded degree of evidence, is a piece of informationthat seems prima facie likely to be distorted by reproductionnoise. To investigate this issue, we present the results of a two-step iterated narration study: first, we collected a corpus of250 crime story reproductions that were produced in parallelreproduction chains of 5 generations in depth, for 5 differentseed stories; a second separate large-scale experiment then tar-geted readers’ interpretation of these reproductions. Crucially,strength of evidence for the guilt of each story’s suspect(s)was manipulated in the initial seed stories. Across genera-tions, readers’ guilt perceptions decreased when the evidencewas originally strong, but remained stable when evidence wasoriginally weak. Analysis of linguistic measures revealed thatdissimilarity between a seed story and its reproduction, storylength, and amount of hedging language affected the readers’own guilt perception and the readers’ attribution of guilt per-ception to the author differently. The results provide evidencethat evidential information indeed influences guilt perceptionin complex ways.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"experimental pragmatics; iterated narration; trans-mission chains; uncertain evidence"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1v21w7sj","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Elisa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kreiss","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"","last_name":"Franke","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Osnabrück","department":""},{"first_name":"Judith","middle_name":"","last_name":"Degen","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28763/galley/18634/download/"}]}