Human dialogue is governed by communicative norms thatspeakers are expected to follow in order to be viewed as coop-erative dialogue partners. Accordingly, for language-capableautonomous agents to be effective human teammates they mustbe able to understand and generate language that complieswith those norms. Moreover, these linguistic norms are highlycontext sensitive, requiring autonomous agents to be able tomodel the contextual factors that dictate when and how thosenorms are applied. In this work, we consider three key lin-guistic norms (directness, brevity, and politeness), and exam-ine the extent to which adherence to these norms varies underchanges to three key contextual factors (potential for harm, in-terlocutor authority, and time pressure). Our results, based ona human-subject study involving 5,642 human utterances, pro-vide strong evidence that speakers do indeed vary their adher-ence to these norms under changes to these contextual factors.

One of the principle tenets of modern behavioral ethics is thathuman morality is dynamic and malleable. Recent work intechnology ethics has highlighted the role technologies canplay in this process. As such, it is the responsibility oftechnology designers to actively identify and address possi-ble negative consequences of such technological mediation. Inthis work, we examine dialogue systems employed by currentrobotic agents, arguing that they can have deleterious effectson both the human moral ecosystem and human perception ofthe robots, regardless of the robots’ actual ethical competence.We present a preliminary Bayesian analysis of empirical datasuggesting that the architectural status quo of clarification re-quest generation systems may (1) cause robots to unintention-ally miscommunicate their ethical intentions (our two tests forthis yielded Bayes factors of 1319 and 1099) and (2) weakenhumans’ contextual application of moral norms (Bayes fac-tor of 1069).