Imprecision, personae, and pragmatic reasoning

Recent work at the interface of semantics and sociolinguistics showed that listeners reason about the semantic/pragmatic properties of linguistic utterances to draw social inferences about the speaker (Acton and Potts 2014; Beltrama 2018; Jeong 2021). These findings raise the question of whether reverse effects exist as well, i.e., whether (and how) social meanings can also impact the interpretation of semantic/pragmatic meanings. Using (im)precision as a case study, we provide experimental evidence that (i) numerals receive stricter interpretations when utteredbyNerdy(vs. Chill) speakers; and that (ii) this effect is stronger for comprehenders who don’t (strongly) identify with the speaker, suggesting that pragmatic reasoning is crucially shaped by social information about both the speaker and the comprehender. These findings suggest that different layers of meanings inform one another in a bi-directional fashion – i.e., semantic information can invite social inferences, and Misocial information can guide meaning interpretation.

Rational Dictators in the Dictator Game Are Seen as Cold and Agentic but Not Intelligent

In Dictator Games, dictators decide how much of a given endowment to send to receivers with no further interactions. We explored the social inferences people draw about dictators from the dictators’ money amount sent and vice versa in 11 experiments ( N = 1,425): Participants rated “unfair” dictators, who sent little or no money, as more agentic, but less communal than “fair” dictators, who sent half of the endowment. Conversely, participants expected more agentic and conservative but less communal dictators to send less money than less agentic, more liberal, or more communal dictators. Participants also rated unfair dictators as less intelligent but expected less intelligent dictators to send more money. When participants played the Dictator Game with real money, only self-reported communion predicted the money amount sent. Thus, participants’ inferences might not reflect reality, but rational social actors should not only fear to appear unfair but also unintelligent.

Social inferences from physical evidence via Bayesian event reconstruction

Human Theory of Mind is typically associated with the ability to infer mental states from observed behavior. In many cases, however, people can also infer the mental states of agents whose behavior they cannot see, based on the physical evidence left behind. We hypothesized that this capacity is supported by a form of mental event reconstruction. Under this account, observers derive social inferences by reconstructing the agents' behavior, based on the physical evidence that revealed their presence. We present a computational model of this idea, embedded in a Bayesian framework for action understanding, and show that its predictions match human inferences with high quantitative accuracy. Our results shed light on how people infer others' mental states from indirect physical evidence and on people's ability to extract social information from the physical world.

Social inferences from the use of just as an exclusive particle

Recent work has begun to investigate the interaction between semantics and social meaning. This study contributes to that line of inquiry by investigating how particular social meanings that are popularly believed to arise from the English discourse particle just are related to the conventional semantic meaning of just. In addition to proposing an inferential process by which the social meanings associated with just arise, this paper reports the results of a social perception experiment designed to test whether those social inferences arise when just is used in particular speech acts and whether they depend on the speaker’s gender and level of authority relative to the addressee. The use of just was found to significantly increase the perceived insecurity of men but not of women. This suggests that listeners may more strongly perceive speaker qualities that stereotypes cause them not to expect.

Are Category Labels Primary? Children Use Similarities to Reason About Social Groups

While interpersonal similarities impact young children’s peer judgments, little work has assessed whether they also guide group-based reasoning. A common assumption has been that category labels rather than “mere” similarities are unique constituents of such reasoning; the present work challenges this. Children (ages 3–9) viewed groups defined by category labels or shared preferences, and their social inferences were assessed. By age 5, children used both types of information to license predictions about preferences (Study 1, n = 129) and richer forms of coalitional structure (Study 2, n = 205). Low-level explanations could not account for this pattern (Study 3, n = 72). Finally, older but not younger children privileged labeled categories when they were pitted against similarity (Study 4, n = 51). These studies show that young children use shared preferences to reason about relationships and coalitional structure, suggesting that similarities are central to the emergence of group representations.