When we use language, it seems so
easy to understand what other people are saying that it is hard to appreciate
the complexity of the act of carrying on a conversation. Obviously, we miscommunicate at times, but most
of the time, we do a good job of understanding what other people mean and
making ourselves understood.
It is particularly striking that
we are so good at communicating when we realize how often we do not say
directly what we mean to other people.
Even in everyday situations, we
often speak indirectly. For example, you
might ask a colleague “Can you open the door?”
You are not literally asking this colleague whether she is capable of
opening the door. You are asking for her
help.
In addition to this indirect
speech, we use a lot of terms whose meanings are ambiguous. For example, in the previous sentence, I used
the phrase “a lot.” What does that mean. It means more than a few and not as many as a
ton but it does not refer to a specific number.
We use these ambiguous terms for
many reasons. One reason is that
specific values may not be available (or all that relevant). I don’t know exactly how many ambiguous terms
there are in English, but a lot seems
like a reasonable description of them, and so I use that term.
An interesting paper by Thomas
Holtgraves in the August, 2014 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examines the role people’s
beliefs about saving face on the way we understand ambiguous words.
Whenever we communicate with
someone else, we are presenting something about ourselves to others. The public view of our selves is called our face.
We want to manage the impression we give to others and to present as
positive a face as possible. In
addition, most of the time we don’t want to put our conversation partners in a
situation in which they will lose face in our interaction.
For example, suppose a friend
cooks you a meal. At the end of the
meal, you can say, “I liked it.” The
word “like” is ambiguous, and so you can use it for a range of attitudes toward
the meal, but it allows your conversation partner to maintain a positive
impression while you are talking.
If people are sensitive to this
use of language, then they should assume that when people use ambiguous
evaluations like this when talking with friends, their actual impression of the
object is less good than when there is no reason to be worried the face of
their conversation partner.
To test this possibility, the
researcher had people read fictitious conversations between people. Sometimes, the speaker was evaluating an item
(like a home-cooked meal) that was made by the hearer. They used ambiguous words such as “liked,”
“loved,” “good,” and “excellent.” Other
times, the speaker was evaluating an item that was made by a third person, so
that the face of the hearer was not involved.
For example, Sue might ask Jenny whether she liked the meal that Harry
cooked, and Jenny might reply, “I liked it.”
Then, participants rated how much they thought the speaker actually
liked the item.
Consistent with the idea that
people are concerned about preserving face in conversations, participants rated
that the speaker liked the object (such as the meal) less when they used an
ambiguous word and were talking to the person who created the item than when
they were talking to a person who did not make the item. That is, people assume that the speaker is
trying to help the hearer save face by not telling the hearer exactly what they
thought of their product.
In other studies, Holtgraves
demonstrated a similar effect with words that refer to frequencies and
quantities like often or sometimes. In this case, the speaker was telling the
hearer that the hearer had a negative quality.
For example, Sue might tell Jenny “You sometimes have bad breath.” Or, Sue and Jenny might be talking about
Harry and Sue might say “he sometimes has bad breath.”
In this case, participants thought
the speaker meant that the ambiguous word to refer to a higher frequency when
it was used to save face than when it wasn’t.
That is, telling Jenny she sometimes has bad breath means that she has
it more often than telling Jenny that Harry sometimes has bad breath.
These studies demonstrate that a
lot of the complexity of using language properly is not a result of the
language itself, but rather a result of the way we use language to manage our
social interactions. Because we are
sensitive to people’s need to preserve a positive public face, we use the
ambiguity of language to help them do that.
Ambiguous words are helpful,
because they do not require us to come out and criticize other people
forcefully when we want to give them bad news.
Instead, we can soften the blow and make the conversation go more
smoothly by giving the hearer some wiggle room in how they interpret what is
said.
