Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.