Dr. Bruno Galantucci, associate professor of psychology, partnered with Eliyahu Spivack and Nathaniel Paley, two psychology majors at , and Benjamin Langstein, a fourth-year student at , to publish 鈥淩epair Avoidance: When Faithful Informational Exchanges Don鈥檛 Matter That Much鈥 in Issue 44 of Cognitive Science. Their research found that the Faithfulness Assumption in communication鈥攖hat people engage in faithful exchanges of information鈥攎ay, in their words, be a 鈥渕isleading鈥 assumption: 鈥淐ommunicating faithfully is a substantially demanding task, and people often fail at it.鈥
Here is the abstract of the article. Full text can be found here.
Abstract
Common鈥恠ense intuition suggests that, when people are engaged in informational exchanges, they communicate so as to be reasonably sure that they perform the exchanges faithfully. Over the years, we have found evidence suggesting that this intuition, which is woven into several influential theories of human communication, may be misleading. We first summarize this evidence and discuss its potential limitations. Then, we present a new study that addresses the potential limitations. A confederate instructed participants to 鈥減ick up the skask鈥 from a tray containing six objects and move it to a specific location. Since skask is a non鈥恮ord invented by us, participants had to ask for clarification to perform the instruction faithfully. In contradiction with the intuition that people pursue faithfulness when engaged in informational exchanges, 29 of the 48 participants we tested performed the instruction without asking for clarification. We identified a possible cause for this behavior, which occurred more frequently when avoiding the clarification was unlikely to result in an overt consequence (an error in the execution of the instruction that could be noticed by the confederate or the experimenter). Other factors such as individual differences and the specific interpersonal dynamics of the experimental settings, if they played a role at all, did it to an extent that is unlikely to be comparable to that of the role played by overt consequences. Considered together, our various assessments of the extent to which people engage in faithful informational exchanges converge on a simple conclusion: Communicating faithfully is a substantially demanding task, and people often fail at it. We discuss the implications of this conclusion and speculate on its relevance for understanding the evolutionary past of human communication.
