{"pk":49317,"title":"Low Power Constrains the Space of Narratives Available to Speakers","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How does power shape communicative freedom? During communication, speakers often balance multiple competing goals—such as being informative versus preserving their reputation. Across four experiments (N=~1400), we examined how the power relation between speakers and listeners affects narrative production in the face of conflicting informational and reputational goals. Participants imagined having to confess about a minor wrongdoing and were assigned to low, equal, or high power roles (an employee speaking to a supervisor, co-worker, or intern). Low power speakers were more likely to prioritize informativeness and believability. Importantly, the open-ended narratives they provided were more homogenous than those of high or equal power narrators, suggesting that power restricts the range of utterance choices considered. Speakers' ratings of pre-written narratives indicated that power may additionally affect how speakers evaluate the believability of different utterance choices.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Philosophy; Psychology; Language Production; Social cognition"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/28w9j53d","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Judy","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kim","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Molly","middle_name":"J","last_name":"Crockett","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49317/galley/37278/download/"}]}