Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Why are we polite when we talk to one another? One hypoth-esis is that people expect others to choose what to say basedon their goals both to transfer information efficiently (an epis-temic goal) and to make the listener feel good (a social goal).In our previous work, we found that when these two goals con-flict, they sometimes produce white lies. In the current work,we expand on this theory to consider another prominent case ofpolite speech: indirect remarks using negation (e.g., “It wasn’tamazing”). With minimal extensions from our previous frame-work, our formal model suggests that a pragmatic speaker willproduce more indirect remarks when the speaker wants to beinformative and seem considerate at the same time. Thesepredictions were borne out in a language production experi-ment. These findings suggest that the conflict between socialand epistemic goals can account for a broad range of politenessphenomena.