In our daily communication, there are some implicit conversation rules, e.g. you are supposed to answer questions if I ask you, I should greet the other if she says Hi to me.
But some violation of rules makes the question interesting.
Maxim of quantity
Imagine a scenario, your colleague asked you “How is your day?”, you said, “Oh I woke up at 7 this morning, I got some coffee first and then read some newspaper…” You know it is inappropriate because you are providing excessive information. Either too little or too much information broke the rule of conversation. It is the maxim of quantity.
Maxim of relevance
Here is an interesting paper that questions human’s ability to detect incoherence in conversation. Galantucci & Roberts (2014) did a study in which two pairs of participants chatted about two pictures. The images in each pair were the same except the color. Both of the images for two pairs had five famous figures but in different settings. As the picture below shows.
Each pair knew their cartoons were different in color but they did not know the existence of another pair. Over the course of the conversation, there were four 30-second crossing during which a random member of Pair was re-partnered to a random member of Pair B. After 15 minutes they were asked to answer questions about their feelings in the conversation and guess whether they were in the crossing or non-crossing group (50% in crossing group).
The result shows that over 40% of participants failed to notice that the conversation went wrong. The crossing detection rate was 57.9% and not significant. Although the study itself was problematic and had a various explanation, it is interesting to look at how people detect the relevance in conversation.
Another study by Langer et al. (1978) tested how people process incoming information by using request, placebic info, and real info when asking for jumping into a line of printing.
The result shows that when the number of copy is small (e.g. 5), the detection rates of placebic and real information were nearly the same. Only when you ask for 20 copies, people would think about it and may refuse.
Are human beings really not good at detecting irrelevance? What about people’s performance in a non-chill situation?
Rogers and Norton (2011) did some interesting studies about dodging. What if we answer the wrong question in the right way? which is a common strategy of politicians.
They conducted a series of studies. In the first one, they asked each participant to watch a 4-min clip of a mock political debate designed to simulate an actual televised debate. Participants were randomly assigned to one condition of a 3 (goal: none, social, dodge detection) x 3 (dodge: correct, similar, dissimilar) between-subjects design.
The correct condition watched matched question and answer while the dodge one watched dismatched. The social goal means social evaluation such whether like this person or not. Dodge detection goal asked participants to pay attention to the question.
The result is amazing. How low the detection rate is!
Maxim of Manner
The subsequent study also revealed human’s failure in detecting dodging. Three conditions: correct answer delivered fluently, similar answer delivered fluently, and correct answer delivered disfluently were tested.
It is good to see the recall rate of the question is sane. But interpersonal ratings (how much they trusted him, how much they liked him, how honest he was, and how capable he was) had no relationship with whether the answer was correct or not. So a good lesson to know, next time of your public speaking, if someone asked a question you cannot answer at the spot, you should say, “This is a good question, I do not totally understand your question, but here is my explanation of a similar one...” Then the audience will forget the original question and still like you!
To summarize, there are three types of conversation rules:
Maxim of quantity
Maxim of quality
Maxim of relevance
Even though this week’s readings were not computational papers, they are so insightful and interesting.
Reference
Galantucci, Bruno and Gareth Roberts. 2014. Do we notice when communication goes awry? An investigation of people's sensitivity to coherence in spontaneous conversation. PLoS ONE 9(7).
Langer, Ellen J, Arthur Blank, and Benzion Chanowitz.1978. The mindlessness of ostensibly thoughtful action: The role of "placebic" information in interpersonal interaction. J Pers Soc Psychol 36 (6): 635.
Rogers, Todd and Michael I. Norton. 2011. The artful dodger: Answering the wrong question the right way. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 17 (2).
