Common‐sense 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 “pick up the skask” from a tray containing six objects and move it to a specific location. Since skask is a non‐word 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.

中文翻译：

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避免维修：当忠实的信息交流不那么重要时

常识直觉表明，当人们进行信息交流时，他们进行交流是为了合理地确保他们忠实地进行交流。多年来，我们发现证据表明，这种被编织到几个有影响力的人类交流理论中的直觉可能具有误导性。我们首先总结了这一证据并讨论了其潜在的局限性。然后，我们提出了一项解决潜在局限性的新研究。一位同盟指示参与者从一个装有 6 个物体的托盘中“拿起 skask”并将其移动到特定位置。由于斯卡斯克是我们发明的非单词，参与者必须要求澄清才能忠实地执行指令。与人们在进行信息交流时追求忠诚的直觉相反，我们测试的 48 名参与者中有 29 名在没有要求澄清的情况下执行了指令。我们确定了这种行为的可能原因，当避免澄清不太可能导致明显后果（可能被同盟者或实验者注意到的指令执行错误）时，这种行为会更频繁地发生。其他因素，如个体差异和实验环境的特定人际动态，如果它们发挥了作用，那么在一定程度上不太可能与明显后果所发挥的作用相提并论。综合考虑，我们对人们进行忠实信息交流的程度的各种评估都集中在一个简单的结论上：忠实地交流是一项要求很高的任务，而且人们经常会失败。我们讨论了这一结论的含义，并推测其与理解人类交流进化历史的相关性。