Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Conveying information in a false or indirect manner in consid-eration of listeners’ wants (i.e. being polite) seemingly contra-dicts an important goal of a cooperative speaker: informationtransfer. We propose that a cooperative speaker considers bothepistemic utility, or utility of providing the listener new and ac-curate information, and social utility, or utility of maintainingor boosting the listener’s self-image (being polite). We for-malize this tradeoff within a probabilistic model of languageunderstanding and test it with empirical data on people’s infer-ences about the relation between a speaker’s goals, utterancesand the true states of the world.