Yoon Erica J, Tessler Michael Henry, Goodman Noah D, Frank Michael C
Department of Psychology, Stanford University.
Open Mind (Camb). 2020 Nov;4:71-87. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00035.
Language is a remarkably efficient tool for transmitting information. Yet human speakers make statements that are inefficient, imprecise, or even contrary to their own beliefs, all in the service of being polite. What rational machinery underlies polite language use? Here, we show that polite speech emerges from the competition of three communicative goals: to convey information, to be kind, and to present oneself in a good light. We formalize this goal tradeoff using a probabilistic model of utterance production, which predicts human utterance choices in socially sensitive situations with high quantitative accuracy, and we show that our full model is superior to its variants with subsets of the three goals. This utility-theoretic approach to speech acts takes a step toward explaining the richness and subtlety of social language use.
语言是传递信息的一种极其高效的工具。然而，人类说话者会做出效率低下、不准确甚至与自己信念相悖的陈述，而这一切都是为了礼貌。礼貌语言使用背后的理性机制是什么？在这里，我们表明礼貌言语源于三个交际目标的竞争：传达信息、友善待人以及展现良好形象。我们使用言语生成的概率模型将这种目标权衡形式化，该模型在社会敏感情境中能以高定量精度预测人类的言语选择，并且我们表明完整模型优于具有这三个目标子集的变体模型。这种言语行为的效用理论方法朝着解释社会语言使用的丰富性和微妙性迈出了一步。
