Department of Psychology, The New School for Social Research.
Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.
Top Cogn Sci. 2018 Apr;10(2):452-484. doi: 10.1111/tops.12330. Epub 2018 Apr 6.
This paper examines when conceptual misalignments in dialog lead to consequential miscommunication. Two studies explore misunderstanding in survey interviews of the sort conducted by governments and social scientists, where mismeasurement can have real social costs. In 131 interviews about tobacco use, misalignment between respondents' and researchers' conceptions of ordinary expressions like "smoking" and "every day" was quantified by probing respondents' interpretations of survey terms and re-administering the survey questionnaire with standard definitions after the interview. Respondents' interpretations were surprisingly variable, and in many cases they did not match the conceptions that researchers intended them to use. More often than one might expect, this conceptual variability was consequential, leading to answers (and, in principle, to estimates of the prevalence of smoking and related attributes in the population) that would have been different had conceptualizations been aligned; for example, fully 12% of respondents gave a different answer about having smoked 100 cigarettes in their entire life when later given a standard definition. In other cases misaligned interpretations did not lead to miscommunication, in that the differences would not have led to different survey responses. Although clarification of survey terms during the interview sometimes improved conceptual alignment, this was not guaranteed; in this corpus some needed attempts at clarification were never made, some attempts did not succeed, and some seemed to make understanding worse. The findings suggest that conceptual misalignments may be more frequent in ordinary conversation than interlocutors know, and that attempts to detect and clarify them may not always work. They also suggest that at least some unresolved misunderstandings do not matter in the sense that they do not change the outcome of the communication-in this case, the survey estimates.
本文探讨了对话中概念不一致如何导致后果性的误解。两项研究探讨了在政府和社会科学家进行的调查访谈中出现的误解，这种误解可能会带来真正的社会成本。在 131 次关于烟草使用的访谈中，通过探究受访者对调查术语的理解以及在访谈后重新使用带有标准定义的调查问卷，量化了受访者和研究人员对“吸烟”和“每天”等普通表述的概念理解之间的偏差。受访者的解释出人意料地多样化，在许多情况下，他们的理解与研究人员期望他们使用的概念并不匹配。在许多情况下，这种概念上的差异是有后果的，会导致回答（以及原则上对人群中吸烟和相关属性的流行率的估计）与概念一致的情况下有所不同；例如，完全有 12%的受访者在后来给出标准定义时，对一生中吸过 100 支香烟的回答会有所不同。在其他情况下，概念不一致的解释并没有导致误解，因为这些差异不会导致不同的调查回答。尽管在访谈中澄清调查术语有时可以改善概念一致性，但这并不能保证；在本语料库中，有些需要澄清的术语从未得到澄清，有些尝试没有成功，有些似乎使理解变得更糟。研究结果表明，概念不一致在日常对话中可能比对话者所知道的更为频繁，而且试图发现和澄清这些不一致可能并不总是有效。它们还表明，至少一些未解决的误解在某种意义上并不重要，即它们不会改变沟通的结果——在这种情况下，是调查估计。
