Politeness in conversation is a fascinating aspect of human interaction that directly interfaces language use and human social behavior more generally. We show how game theory, as a higher-order theory of behavior, can provide the tools to understand and model polite behavior. The recently proposed responsibility exchange theory (Chaudhry and Loewenstein in Psychol Rev 126(3):313–344, 2019) describes how the polite communications of thanking and apologizing impact two different types of an agent’s social image: (perceived) warmth and (perceived) competence. Here, we extend this approach in several ways, most importantly by adding a cultural-evolutionary dynamics that makes it possible to investigate the evolutionary stability of politeness strategies. Our analysis shows that in a society of agents who value status-related traits (such as competence) over reciprocity-related traits (such as warmth), both the less and the more polite strategies are maintained in cycles of cultural-evolutionary change.

对话中的礼貌是人类互动中一个令人着迷的方面，它更直接地将语言使用与人类社会行为联系起来。我们展示了博弈论作为一种行为的高级理论，如何提供理解和建模礼貌行为的工具。最近提出的责任交换理论（Chaudhry和Loewenstein在Psychol Rev 126（3）：313–344，2019）中描述了感谢和道歉的礼貌交流如何影响代理人的两种不同类型的社会形象：（感知到的）温暖和（感知到的） ）能力。在这里，我们以几种方式扩展了这种方法，最重要的是，通过添加文化进化动力学来研究礼貌策略的进化稳定性。