ABSTRACT

Requesting plays a key role in human communication. One can request the same thing in multiple ways (e.g., “Pass the salt” vs. “Could you pass the salt?”). How do speakers determine which request form to produce? And how does this choice affect a recipient’s evaluation of a request? Previous analyses of naturalistic conversations suggest that a speaker’s entitlement – their expectations that the recipient of a request is able and willing to fulfill it – can influence their formatting decisions. However, the role of entitlement in format selection has not been tested experimentally, nor is it known how a requester’s entitlement impacts a recipient’s evaluation of a request form. Across several online experiments, we asked whether manipulations of a speaker’s entitlement influenced formatting preferences across requesters and recipients. While requesters robustly recognized normative mappings between entitlement and request formatting (Experiment 2), they did not necessarily follow these mappings unprompted (Experiments 1–1b); instead, they tended to produce modal interrogative requests (“Can you do X?”), regardless of entitlement. Recipients, however, systematically modulated their preferences for particular forms as a function of a requester’s entitlement (Experiment 3). We also conducted exploratory analyses on the data from each experiment using human-normed judgments about entitlement and other social-interactional variables (e.g., degree of imposition); critically, for both Experiments 2 and 3, judgments about a requester’s entitlement explained variance in participants’ responses above and beyond other variables.

摘要

请求在人类交流中起着关键作用。一个人可以以多种方式请求同一件事（例如，“通过盐”与“您可以通过盐吗？”）。演讲者如何确定要制作哪种请求表？这种选择如何影响收件人对请求的评估？先前对自然主义对话的分析表明，演讲者的权利–他们对请求接收者有能力并愿意满足请求的期望–可能会影响他们的格式化决定。但是，权利在格式选择中的作用尚未经过实验测试，也不知道请求者的权利如何影响收件人对请求表格的评估。在几个在线实验中，我们询问对说话者权利的操纵是否会影响请求者和接收者之间的格式偏好。虽然请求者强烈认可权利和请求格式之间的规范映射（实验2），它们不一定遵循未提示的这些映射（实验1-1b）；取而代之的是，他们倾向于产生模态询问请求（“您可以X吗？”），而与权利无关。但是，收件人会根据请求者的资格来系统地调整对特定形式的偏好（实验3）。我们还使用关于权利和其他社会互动变量（例如，施加程度）的人为判断来对每个实验的数据进行探索性分析；至关重要的是，对于实验2和实验3，关于请求者权利的判断解释了参与者的响应超出其他变量的方差。