1. art and entertainment
2. humor

8
What is Said and What is Meant:
Conversational Implicatures in
Natural Conversations, Research
Settings, Media, and Advertising
MICHAELA WÄNKE
One day Joe bear was hungry. He asked his friend Irving bird where some
honey was. Irving told him there was a beehive in the oak tree. Joe threatened
to hit Irving if he didn’t tell him where some honey was. (Schank & Childers,
1984, p. 83; example from the development of TALE-SPIN, a computer program that makes up stories)
A
pparently Joe bear did not understand the meaning of the word “beehive”.
Needless to say, a lack of semantic understanding makes communication
difficult if not impossible. But consider the following example:
At a holiday resort a woman comes to the swimming pool and sits down next to
another woman who is intended to strike up a conversation. “Hi”, the neighbour says, “where do you come from?” “From my room” the new guest replies
friendly. “No, I mean where do you live?” “At home, of course”, the woman
answers. “But where is ‘home’?” “Oh, you mean, where my house is?” “Yes”,
sighs the interrogator with relief, “that’s what I mean”. “Right next to the
Jones”.
This example demonstrates that semantic understanding is not sufficient for a
successful communication. Given that the goal of communication is to convey
meaning, the task of a listener is to understand what the speaker intends to mean.
Most often, to understand what is meant requires going beyond the literal meaning of what is said. In other words, listeners have to make inferences in order to
arrive at a pragmatic understanding. The need for such pragmatic inferences then
of course calls for rules for inferences. Moreover, successful communication
requires that all conversation partners share knowledge about these rules. In this
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respect, shared knowledge about inference rules is part of the “common ground”
which is defined as the information a speaker and an addressee believe they share
(Clark & Marshall, 1981; Clark & Schober, 1991). One shared principle from
which inference rules may be derived has been expressed by Paul Grice as the
cooperative principle when he observed that “our talk exchanges . . . are characteristically, to some degree at least, a cooperative effort” (1975; p 45). The cooperative principle is the general principle underlying many more specific rules, which
govern conversations, and if used as inference rules determine understanding in
various social settings. After a detailed discussion of the cooperative principle I
will turn to its application as an inference rule in one important domain of social
exchange, namely the use and understanding of irony. Interestingly, the application of the cooperative principle as an inference rule is not constrained to natural
conversations. The latter part of the present chapter is devoted to inferences in nonnatural communication settings. Specifically, I will review how research participants infer the meaning of instructions and research material and what inferences
recipients draw from statements in advertising and in media reports.
THE COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE AS A PRAGMATIC
INFERENCE RULE
Joe bear apparently did not only miss the meaning of beehives. His failure went
further and caused him to act strangely – at least from a human perspective.
Normally, people tacitly assume that others respond to their questions in a manner
that provides the information seeker with valid and relevant information to his
question. As it was, Joe bear – or the computer program – did not understand what
Grice called conversational implicatures (Grice, 1975). Implicatures refer to the
meaning of an utterance that goes beyond its literal meaning. They result as a
consequence of the cooperative principle, which participants expect each other to
observe:
Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at
which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in
which you are engaged. (1975; p. 45).
Had Joe assumed that Irving’s contribution was a cooperative effort with respect
to the purpose of Joe’s search for honey he would have understood the implicature
or pragmatic meaning of Irving’s answer, namely that beehives are a means to
achieve honey. In general then, observing the cooperative principle and taking the
mutually accepted purpose into account will help to work out the meaning of an
utterance.
Sub-principles
The cooperative principle is the summary of several sub-principles referred to as
maxims.
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
The Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required
(for the current purposes of the exchange)
Do not make your contribution more informative
than is required
The Maxim of Quality:
Do not say what you believe to be false
Do not say that for which you lack adequate
evidence
The Maxim of Relation: Be relevant
The Maxim of Manner: Avoid obscurity
Avoid ambiguity
Be brief
Be orderly
Although Grice phrased them as imperatives, these maxims are less prescriptive
norms that speakers follow than they are ideals that represent reference points.
For example, the maxim of quantity represents an ideal point at which everything
that is said is informative and everything that is informative is said. Clearly,
speakers deviate either intentionally or unintentionally from these ideals in various
degrees, and any deviation may in itself carry meaning. Communication involves
playing with these expectations, as the later examples will illustrate. Nevertheless,
these maxims provide a framework for the interpretation of a given utterance in a
given context. If one assumes the communication partner to adhere to the maxim
of quantity, for example, one would have to infer that all the provided details are
necessary with regard to the requested information. Moreover one would have to
infer that no necessary details are withheld on purpose. Such pragmatic inferences
or conversational implicatures are not necessarily the same as logical implications.
For example, the statement “Jane has three children” logically implies that she
has any number of children greater than or equal to three. Conversationally the
statement implies that she has exactly three children or the maxim of quantity
would have demanded the speaker to say “Jane has at least three children”. Take
another example from a conversation between business partners about a project:
A: “Can you give me a call tomorrow?” B: “Tomorrow is my wife’s birthday”.
Logically B’s answer seems unrelated to A’s request and makes no sense. However,
most people will understand that B does not intend to do business the following
day, as he has plans to celebrate his wife’s birthday. What may be debatable is how
much effort this particular inference requires. Does it come automatically or does
it involve some thinking? I will turn to this issue later.
Grice acknowledges that there are all sorts of other maxims depending on the
specific purpose of the talk, for example influencing others or directing others’
actions. Particularly when it comes to direct social exchange, speakers may additionally consider the injunction “be polite”. The four core maxims, which are
listed here, are those mainly connected with the purpose of a maximally efficient
exchange of information. Given, however, that the exchange or the disseminating
of information is – even if it is not the main purpose – one purpose in most
communication, one may safely assume that these four maxims are the most
important ones. By and large these four maxims overlap with the rules and norms
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postulated in other models. McCann and Higgins (1992) list eight rules for
communicators, which are almost fully congruent with the Gricean maxims.
Sperber and Wilson (1986) subsume all maxims under the principle of relevance,
probably the most important one of the four.
Certainly, as already mentioned above, these maxims are not descriptive of
everyday discourse. Rather they represent a set of expectations about communication that allows for interpreting a speaker’s intended meaning. When the exchange
is assumed to be governed by conversational norms one would expect clear,
informative, relevant, true, and maybe polite utterances. A particularly intriguing
aspect of the cooperative principle is that deliberate violations can be as meaningful
as is compliant observance.
Meaningful Violations
Based on the cooperative principle, a listener would assume that any apparent
flouting by the speaker is not to be taken literally and is not the intended meaning.
Thus, apparent violations of conversational norms may serve to indicate that
statement is not meant literally and instigate the recipient to reinterpret the
utterance to infer the pragmatic rather than the semantic implications. Recipients
may read between the lines, for example, if an utterance is obviously less informative than it should be. Consider the example given by Grice of the following
statement in a letter of recommendation for a philosopher’s job: “Dear sir, Mr. X’s
command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular,
Yours, etc.” For anyone familiar with the requirements of a letter of reference
it is obvious that the writer omitted far more important information. It may be
presumed that the writer also knew the requirements of a letter of reference and
hence one may infer that he did omit the information on purpose in order to
implicate that the candidate is unsuitable for a philosopher’s job. A deliberate
flouting of the maxim of quality is of course the principle of irony as illustrated
later. But also rhetoric figures such as metaphors, meioses, and hyperboles (e.g.
“every nice girl loves a sailor) are obviously not meant to be literally true.
Last but not least (for more examples see Grice, 1975), a speaker may be deliberately obscure to signal to a recipient that the contents of the talk should not be
known to a third party who is also present. If A says to B “I will not do what you
asked me to do in your letter but will do what we discussed the other day”, then A
makes clear that he does not want C to know what B had requested and what they
had discussed.
These examples illustrate that successful communication also requires that
recipients recognize intended violations. How essential these basic communication skills are for social interaction becomes evident when we imagine having a
conversation with someone lacking these skills, as for example in the introductory
example at the vacation resort. People who suffer from autistic spectrum disorders, especially Asperger’s syndrome, and patients with damage in certain brain
areas often have difficulties in understanding the pragmatic meaning of what is
said and may feel confused by non-literal speech. Hence they may fail to respond
to indirect requests such as “Can you pass the salt” and would respond to “where
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
do you come from?” with “from outside”. Jokes and irony may send them into
states of high anxiety and they therefore miss out on some essential parts of human
interaction.
How Much Effort Does it Take and What Else is Needed?
What becomes clear from a look at the maxims and their implications is how
communication involves highly complex tasks. For a successful communication
speakers need to find out what is informative for the partner and shape their
utterances according to the common ground. Receivers are not passive either.
They are highly skilled to infer different meanings according to the situational
context. The question “Where do you work ?” will yield different answers depending on whether the question is posed at the company’s inter-office Christmas
party or at a local bar. The question remains whether these inferences occur
automatically or whether they require more effortful thinking. I would assume
that both modes are possible. In the above example of the man mentioning his
wife’s birthday, it helps to share the cultural knowledge that some couples like to
do something special for each other’s birthday and may take the day off from work.
Having such a conception will make the utterance immediately understood. In fact
having any conception about the relation of wives’ birthdays and going to work will
make the sentence immediately understood, although maybe not as had been
intended. Someone coming from a culture where wives spend their birthdays with
their female friends at a retreat may interpret the answer differently: “Tomorrow,
I’m all alone and I have ample time to do business.”
More interesting is the case where the recipient has no conception. At first
glance, the mentioning of the wife’s birthday would make no sense. Still, a listener
who fails to see the relevance at first glance – as Joe Bear did – but who would
assume the partner to behave cooperatively – as Joe Bear did not – would search
for a meaning that would fulfill the required relevance. To do so may entail the use
of additional contextual cues and more cognitive effort.
In either case, high or low effortful inferences, the cooperative principle
serves as the general inference rule: If something is mentioned it must be relevant
to the purpose of the communication. This principle alone however is not sufficient to make a specific inference, but specific knowledge is needed as illustrated
in the above paragraph. Either pre-existing background knowledge or contextual
cues may help to identify the intended meaning.
THE COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE IN DIFFERENT
COMMUNICATION SETTINGS
One may argue that the ability to share a joke or enjoy a friendly teasing is one of
the most important types of social interaction as it promotes getting acquainted
and establishes closeness. For this reason I chose humor and irony in the next
section as an example to illustrate the cooperative principle in more detail. But
just as the cooperative principle may create understanding, it may also create
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misunderstanding if one partner adheres to it and the other does not, or even
deception if the defection is intentional. In the latter parts of the chapter, I will
focus on these two aspects. I will do so for two reasons. First, just as cognitive
biases may teach us about cognitive processes, and optical illusions are enlightening
with regard to how visual perception works, misunderstandings in communication
lend themselves superbly to illustrate the communicative principles. Second, a
rather influential research perspective in social psychology has suggested that
research settings are examples of one-sided adherence to the cooperative principle
and some classical research findings are partly due to research participants’ pragmatic (mis)interpretations of the verbal materials (Bless, Schwarz, & Strack
1993, Hilton, 1995; Schwarz, 1996). I will review the basic assumptions and
main findings of this perspective. While the role of conversational norms in
experimental research and in survey research is well explored, a further and more
speculative part of the chapter will apply conversational logic to mass communication and in particular to advertising. Needless to say that this is where deception
comes in.
Pragmatic Implicatures in Humorous Social Exchanges
Obviously the ability to go beyond the literal meaning in conversations is the
base for having meaningful discourses and understanding each other. It is also
important for identifying and detecting irony and teasing, as these most often
imply utterances which should not be taken literally. Often a cue in recognizing
that a statement is not to be taken literally is that if it were taken literally it would
violate conversational norms. It would not be informative, true, or polite, to
name just a few examples. Hence, the cooperative principle serves as a general
inference rule. However, additional inferences are necessary. Parting from conversational norms may have many reasons, and an addressee needs to make the
correct attributions in order to see the irony in a remark rather than feeling
deceived, or to feel teased rather than insulted. A few examples illustrate such
processes.
The Maxim of Quality A statement is not ironic per se but a speaker is ironic
to a particular listener, namely to a listener who knows that the speaker does not
believe the statement to be true or informative and who also knows that the
speaker is aware of the listener knowing this. Consider an example presented by
Wyer and Collins in their treatise on humor (1992): “Central Illinois is certainly
lovely – all that humidity and corn.” This statement is probably funny to most
people because few people get enthusiastic about humidity and cornfields. But it is
only recognized as irony when the listener believes that the speaker is not one of
those rare people.
Irony is about pretense (Grice, 1978), just like deception. But unlike a deceiving speaker the ironic speaker wants the pretense to be recognized. This all
involves a number of decision steps for a listener to detect irony:
1. Does speaker believe utterance to be true?
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
•
•
If YES: STOP
If NO: Does the speaker want the addressee to believe the statement
to be true?
– If YES: Speaker wants to deceive or is ironic for a third person’s or
own sake
– If NO: Speaker is ironic and wants addressee to share the irony.
To begin with an addressee’s task is to find out whether the speaker could possibly
believe the statement. Often one’s world knowledge may allow such inferences.
Something so outrageous and bizarre that no one in his right mind would believe it
is probably intended to be ironic. Clark and Gerrig (1984) point to Swift’s essay “A
Modest Proposal” as a model piece of irony. In this essay, Swift pretended to
propose to serve Irish children as food for the rich. “Surely Swift’s irony works just
because the idea is so absurd that no one could ever have entertained it seriously”
(Clark & Gerrig, 1984, p. 123). Sometimes, a listener needs a more intimate
knowledge of the speaker’s attitudes and beliefs to recognize a violation against the
maxim of quality. A remark may thus be recognized as ironic by some listeners
who know the speaker’s true feelings, but not by others who are less familiar.
The Maxim of Quantity Violations against the maxim of quality are not the
only form of using conversational implicatures for humorous purposes. Telling
others something they certainly know already and thereby being deliberately
redundant and uninformative is also a form of mocking or teasing. The general
underlying principle is that by pointing out something to someone the speaker
signals that he or she believes this to be new information to the addressee. In
mocking or teasing, the speaker of course only pretends to believe this. Why a
speaker pretends to think of the addressee as ignorant may have different reasons.
Possibly, the speaker wants to point out a neglect or shortcoming. Telling somebody who asks to borrow a cigarette that one can actually buy cigarettes in stores is
a (friendly or unfriendly) reminder that the borrower is overstretching the lender’s
generosity. “Call your son, his name is John by the way” may be a sarcastic remark
to a parent who in the eye of the speaker takes too little interest in the kids. “There
is a new invention, they call it telephones” may ridicule the partner’s negligence to
call. Some remarks are more tricky and require more background knowledge
about the speaker’s attitude to the addressee. Telling George Bush for example
that Berlin is the capital of Germany may be intended as:
1. informative (if one believes he does not know that);
2. a somewhat hostile emphasis of George Bush’s reputation for being
ignorant about the world (meant for others and independent of whether
the speaker does or does not believe George Bush knows the capital of
Germany);
3. a friendly tease playing on the same reputation (meant directly for Bush by
someone who believes Bush knows the capital of Germany).
Telling Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman that he should not judge the probability
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of an event by the ease with which instances come to mind may be considered
as an acknowledgement of his famous work on the availability heuristic1 and
represents another class of violations against the informativeness principle.
It should have become clear that to go through such attributions in order to
detect a statement’s meaning may be complex and may require knowledge about
the speaker as well as of conventions and norms (e.g., how many people like
corn fields; what is adequate to tell the president of the United States). Clearly
the closer one is to a speaker, the better one gets at detecting irony, and can
distinguish friendly teasing from hostile mocking.
Politeness Although the maxim of politeness is not one of the core maxims it is
nevertheless important in social interactions and also in humor. “Would you be so
kind and pass the salt if it is not too much trouble” may be considered as perfectly
appropriate in some social settings but would be considered as violating the briefness principle in most other settings. Using formal and complicated language or
being overly polite in informal settings seems inappropriate. An audience would
need to decide whether the speaker knows that the behavior is inappropriate and
is trying to be funny or whether the speaker is simply socially inept and does not
know what is and what is not suitable.
To some extent the same logic applies to overly impolite statements but the
case of impoliteness is trickier. According to the maxim of politeness one should
not say anything that may offend the addressee. Therefore one can conclude that
everything that, if taken literally, is offensive cannot be meant literally unless one
has reason to assume that the speaker is hostile. Hence, literally rude remarks are
likely to be reinterpreted as teasing (Wyer & Collins, 1992). An addressee of an
impolite remark has to go through the following steps:
1. Is the speaker aware that the remark is literally impolite? (For example,
can one assume that the speaker knows the social and cultural rules, knows
the language adequately, etc.)
•
•
If NO: speaker is socially inept
If YES: Does the speaker intend to be offensive? (For example, is
there a reason why the speaker may be hostile, is the speaker known to
be an aggressive person, etc.)
– If YES: Speaker is hostile toward addressee
– If NO: Remark is not meant literally, speaker is teasing.
Anything that helps to infer that the statement is not meant literally would thus
increase the chance that it is considered as funny bickering. For example, when
the statement is blatantly inaccurate it not only violates the norm of politeness
but also the norm of quality. Saying to Jamie Oliver “too bad, you can’t cook” is
thus quite likely considered as friendly bickering, but this may not be so easily
concluded if the statement is directed at a less famous and successful chef or
amateur cook.
Note that a literally rude comment about a person only violates the maxim of
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
politeness if it is made in the presence of the person.2 A disparaging remark in the
person’s absence may thus be more likely to be interpreted as reflecting the
speaker’s true feelings, unless the remark is blatantly inaccurate (maxim of quality). What may be hurtful if one overheard the speaker say it behind one’s back
may be taken good humouredly if said to one’s face. Another intriguing implication is that the more impolite a comment to one’s face, the less likely it is to be
taken seriously (Wyer & Collins, 1992). Paradoxically, then, a moderately offensive
statement (“The suit you are wearing is a bit unflattering”) may hurt more than an
extremely offensive statement (“We all agree that you are fat and ugly”) – although
of course this is not necessarily so.
So far all examples pertain to a partner understanding correctly what other the
partner meant. Note however that it takes two to cooperate. If one partner relies
on the cooperativeness principle but the other does not adhere to it, misunderstandings are likely. Worse yet, a partner may also intentionally defect in order to
deceive the other one without lying explicitly. These two dynamics are the topics
of the remainder of this chapter.
Pragmatic Implicatures in Research Settings
Research participants are usually given information, for example person descriptions, scenarios, or choice options, etc. They are instructed what to do with the
information, for example form a judgment, and they are asked questions in order
to assess judgments or behavior. Although research settings are often quite standardized and formal, it has been suggested that research participants nevertheless
abide by the same conversational rules they follow in less formalized and more
natural communication settings (Bless, Schwarz, & Strack, 1993; Hilton, 1995;
Schwarz, 1996). Research participants who rely on conversational norms would
assume that the presented information is complete, unambiguous, and relevant
to the task at hand. They would also assume that the questions that are asked
are reasonable and do not involve trick questions or require knowledge they cannot be expected to have. They would further assume that the answer formats
provided are adequate to express their response and are not arbitrarily chosen.
Unfortunately, researchers do not necessarily follow conversational norms. Nor
would they expect that participants do, or that these norms may mislead them.
Researchers may have chosen the information to be irrelevant or incomplete in
order to investigate the impact of such irrelevant or incomplete information in
judgment and decision making. They may have chosen tasks that are unsolvable
for specific reasons. And they may use standardized answer formats that do not
suit the specific situation. This adherence to the cooperative principle on the
participants’ side and the defection on the researcher’s side may account for some
of the findings in classical (social) psychological experiments as well as in survey
research (for reviews see Bless, Schwarz, & Strack, 1993; Hilton, 1990, 1995;
Schwarz, 1996).3 Stimulated by this perspective, several studies analyzed research
settings as a function of violations of the cooperative principle and could support
this hypothesis.
Two basic principles characterize this perspective. First, if research participants
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assume that the information they are given conforms to the conversational norms
(mainly the maxims of quantity and the maxim of relevance), they will assume
that the information is relevant, complete, and sufficient. More importantly,
they will assume that because no irrelevant, redundant, or unnecessary information is given, all information should therefore be used. Many results in socialpsychological research can be explained according to the participant’s notion: “If
the experimenter presents it, I should use it” (Schwarz, 1996, p. 17) The second
basic principle in this perspective is that research participants themselves strive to
make their contributions informative. To do so they have to figure out what exactly
the researcher wants to know. As is shown, research participants use any information to get a clearer picture about what would be informative and how they can
shape their responses adequately.
Research Participants Assume that the Presented Material is
Relevant, Complete, and Sufficient Several effects have been reinter-
preted from this account of the cooperative principle. A classic test for whether
conversational norms are at least partially responsible for an observed effect is to
replicate the paradigm used in the original study with an additional condition, in
which the validity of conversational norms is undermined. If the classic effect is
diminished or even eliminated when participants no longer presume conversational norms to be valid, one may conclude that conversational norms at least
contribute to the effect.
Consider the so-called dilution effect, for example (Nisbett, Zukier, & Lemley,
1981; Zukier,1982). In the normal experimental paradigm, in one condition only
information that is diagnostic (relevant) for the judgment is presented, whereas in
the other condition non-diagnostic (irrelevant) information is added. For example,
in the diagnostic condition participants are asked to predict the Grade Point
Average of a target person and are given this piece of information “He often starts
things he does not finish”. In the non-diagnostic (dilution) condition another
irrelevant piece of information is added, such as “A few times a year he is bothered
by bad dreams”. The lesser impact of the diagnostic information on judgments in
the dilution condition is interpreted as a sign that participants do not ignore
irrelevant information although it does not bear on the judgment. It is assumed
that participants base their judgment on the representativeness of the target for
the judged dimension and this representativeness is diluted by additional nondiagnostic information. From the participants’ perspective, however, any information that is presented is likely to be relevant, otherwise the experimenter would
hardly present it. At least this is what researchers assumed who suspected that
the adherence to conversational norms was responsible for the dilution effect. In
their experiments, participants in one half of the conditions were informed that
some of the information may in fact not be relevant. As a result the dilution effect
diminished (Igou & Bless, 2003a; Tetlock, Lerner, & Boettger, 1996).
Likewise other studies undermined the validity of conversational norms in
classic studies on representativeness and base-rate neglect. Typically, in the
scenarios used by Tversky and Kahneman (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Tversky &
Kahneman, 1973) the statistical information (e.g. better repair record for Saab vs.
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
Volvo) is given first and the contradicting individuating information (“my brotherin-law has had one problem after another with his Saab”) afterwards. What is
usually found is that the individuating and vivid information has more influence
in decisions than the pallid base-rate. Krosnick and colleagues (Krosnick, Li, &
Lehmann, 1990) however noticed that when two-sided messages are presented,
conversational norms would make the second piece of information more relevant.
Given that a speaker who strongly believes in the first argument need not mention
the contradictory evidence, recipients would pragmatically infer that the later
argument must be important and relevant. When base-rate information was given
last it indeed had more impact. More importantly even, when participants were
made to believe that the order was chosen at random and thus the informational
value of the order was undermined, recency effects again diminished. Similarly
Schwarz, Strack, Hilton, and Naderer (1991) found diminished effects in another
classical experiment on base-rate neglect when they undermined the relevance of
presented information.
There are many other examples showing that participants use information that
is presented unless the guarantee of relevance is undermined. In the classic study
on the fundamental attribution error, participants rated a writer of a pro-Castro
essay more Castro friendly than the writer of a contra-Castro essay even when they
were told the writers had no choice in the topic of the essay (Jones & Harris,
1967). Wright and Wells (1988) point out that researchers violate the maxim of
relevance when asking participants to infer an essay writer’s true attitude from an
essay after they had just undermined the diagnosticity of the essay by pointing out
that the topic was assigned rather than freely chosen. As such a request would
make no sense at all, participants may presume that the experimenter nevertheless
believes the essay to have some diagnosticity. Indeed when participants were told
that the information they were given was randomly selected and may not necessarily contain diagnostic information, the effect of the essay’s content diminished
(Wright & Wells, 1988).
The cooperative perspective has also been claimed to contribute to the findings of ingroup favoring in studies on the minimal group paradigm (Blank, 1997).
In the minimal group paradigm participants are assigned to two utterly meaningless categories (e.g. “over-estimators” vs. “under-estimators”). They then have to
distribute goods between an anonymous member of the same category and an
anonymous member of the other category. Blank argued that in such an artificial
situation with no cues to base their decision on participants are likely to assume
that they are supposed to use the otherwise irrelevant category information. In a
condition where the researcher gave a reason why this category membership
information was presented, the typical ingroup bias diminished.
So far all examples follow the principle “if the experimenter presents it, I
should use it” (Schwarz, 1996, p. 17). Another principle that follows from the
cooperative principle is: If the experimenter presents it, it is valid and sufficient
information. Research on fault trees compared people’s estimates for possible
causes for an event (e.g. a car failure) when they were given a large number of
possible causes or only a subset of this list (pruned tree) (Fischhoff, Slovic, &
Lichtenstein, 1978). As it turns out, estimates for each listed cause were higher
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when there were fewer causes listed compared to the full list. Moreover, the
estimate for “other causes” was well below the sum for the causes that were not
presented in the pruned tree but were presented in the full tree. The insensitivity
to omitted alternatives is also referred to as the fault tree phenomenon. Again,
from a conversational perspective, participants may well assume that the
researcher listed the major causes. More precisely, participants interpreted the
task as assigning their estimates to what experts have already identified as the main
causes. They did not interpret the task as a test on their knowledge to come up
with other causes. However, when this assumption that the presented information
is complete and the “other causes” category is negligible was undermined, the
fault tree phenomenon was reduced (Choi & Choi, 2003).
A Gricean perspective may however also account for the neglect of information that the participant considers irrelevant. For example, Ariely and Loewenstein (2000) noted that the duration neglect (e.g. Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993;
Varey & Kahneman, 1992) in the evaluations of experiences may be an artefact
due to the interpretation of the question, rather than an actual insensitivity to
duration. Usually requests for a global rating of an experience or a sequence of
experiences come from conversational partners who want an estimate on the
desirability of the event. One spectacular week at the Grand Canyon does not
really alter the overall desirability of a visit to the Grand Canyon compared to one
spectacular day. Although the traveler would have probably gained more pleasure
from a whole week than from one day, it would be entirely inappropriate to figure
duration into an answer to a question “How was your trip to the great Canyon”.
Research Participants Try to Make Their Responses Informative
The cooperative principle dictates how to make one’s contribution informative. To
do so requires one to find out what is most informative for the partner, in this case
the researcher. In normal conversations, one may draw inferences from one’s
knowledge of the conversation partner, the previous conversation, the context
and if in doubt one may ask for clarification. In standardized research situations
however only the context remains as a possible cue. Accordingly, respondents
will use any cue in the provided information to infer the intended meaning of a
question, even if it does not make sense to the respondent, and to disambiguate
vague concepts or ambiguous answering scales. Previous questions, introductions,
the question wording, answer formats, and any other information may serve this
purpose. Not surprisingly then, minimal and apparently irrelevant changes may
affect responses quite significantly, as some examples will illustrate.
Taking Cues from Who is Sampled Behavioral frequencies are often assessed
by vague quantifiers (e.g. often, seldom, etc.) rather than by objective frequencies.
Respondents may have their own thoughts on how many times constitutes “often”
but they also seem to take cues from the survey context in order to find out what
the researcher would consider as “often”. In one survey, students were told in the
introduction that the survey was either representative for all adult people living in
that town or for the student population at that university. When asked how often
they were going to see a movie, student respondents reported a higher frequency
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
on a vague quantifier scale ranging from “hardly ever” to “very often” when the
survey was believed to be representative for the general population as compared to
when the survey was allegedly representative for university students only (Wänke,
2002). The introduction rendered the respective population a likely standard.
Presumably, respondents inferred that if the study is representative for students
only the researcher wants to know “how often I go to the movies compared to
other students”, whereas when the whole population was surveyed the assumed
standard of comparison changed. Because students (correctly) assumed a higher
frequency among students than among other adults, they gave lower estimates
when they compared themselves to other students.
Taking Cues from Response Scales The survey context may help respondents
interpret what the researcher meant by the vague quantifiers. Conversely, and
probably equally unintentional by the researcher, vague quantifiers and temporal
frames may help respondents to interpret and clarify the behavior in question.
Respondents reported three times more headaches when asked whether they
suffer frequently from headaches compared to when they are asked whether they
occasionally suffer from headaches (Loftus, 1975). Presumably respondents interpreted the question to comprise also less severe cases in the former case. Likewise
respondents who were asked to report how often they felt irritated subsequently
reported more severe annoyances when the answer scale ranged from several
times a year to less than three times per month compared to several times a day to
less than once a week (Igou, Bless, & Schwarz, 2002; Schwarz, Strack, Müller, &
Chassein, 1988). Respondents who strive to make their answer informative must
come up with an interpretation of what is meant by “irritated”. As one can hardly
be expected to remember all small hassles over a year, respondents conclude that
the question cannot refer to these minor annoyances.
Taking Cues from Repeated Questions In a normal conversation one would
not ask the same questions twice – at least not immediately. Doing so would imply
that the speaker is not satisfied with the answer just given. After all, assuming
cooperative partners, asking a question is a request for information one does not
already have (Clark & Clark, 1977). Thus, repeating a question although one has
already been given an answer signals that one wants additional or different information. Again, this conversational rule is sometimes violated in research settings.
Take a child’s perspective in a study on number conversation (Piaget, 1952). The
experimenter shows two rows of an equal number of items and asks which row has
more items or whether they are equal in number. Correctly the child answers that
they both contain the same number of items. Then the experimenter moves the
items in the one row to make it longer but does not add or remove items. Again
the experimenter asks which row contains more. It does not take much imagination to see how this question may confuse the child. After all, the items did not
change since the last answer, but still the experimenter asks again. Most likely
the experimenter must mean something else, and length is a likely candidate.
Indicating the longer line is then the answer of someone striving to make sense
of a weird situation rather than a cognitive bias. In a highly inventive study,
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McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974) found evidence for that interpretation. When
the rearrangement was not done by the experimenter but by a “naughty teddy”
who tried to spoil the game by extending one row while the experimenter was
not looking, the number of children who showed number conversation increased
dramatically. Given the destructive interference by the teddy bear, the experimenter’s question is quite reasonable because, unknown to the experimenter, the
naughty teddy may have changed the number of items. In other words, the
experimenter was now requesting information he did not have already.
The motive not to repeat a previous response has been shown to account for
erroneously low test–retest correlations in projective tests. In Thematic Apperception Tests (TAT) participants are shown a picture and are told to be creative
and make up an imaginative story. As Tomkins (1961, cited in Winter & Stewart,
1977) noted, when individuals are shown the same picture at a later time by
the same experimenter they are faced with the dilemma of whether they should
tell the same story or whether they should follow the test instructions which call
for creativity and therefore tell a new story. When instructions stressed that it did
not matter whether the story was old or new (Heckhausen, 1963; Lundy, 1985;
Winter & Stewart, 1977), or when participants were explicitly instructed to repeat
the old story (Winter & Stewart, 1977), test–retest correlations soared.
The respondents’ tacit assumption that a question is a request for new information also accounts for a number of question order effects in survey research.
Answers to related concepts correlate less when both questions are asked within
the same context or close proximity compared to when both questions are asked
in different contexts. For example, reported satisfaction and reported happiness
correlated higher when both were assessed in different surveys coming from
different sources compared to when both questions were presented in the same
survey following each other (Strack, Schwarz, & Wänke, 1991). Apparently,
respondents interpreted satisfaction as something different from happiness when
both questions followed each other, as there would be no need to report the
same feeling twice. Whereas one may expect that activating relevant information
in a preceding question heightens its accessibility and therefore its use in answering
a subsequent question, conversational norms would forbid the use of that information. Instead of assimilation effects – a higher positive correlation between the two
answers – the opposite, contrast effects, may result if respondents perceive both
questions within one communication context. Presumably, presenting both questions in direct succession implies that both questions must refer to different issues.
A specific question about whether or not abortion should be allowed in cases of
birth defects in the unborn child lowered support to abortion in general when it
was asked before the general question (Schuman, Presser, & Ludwig, 1981).
Whereas the general question presented alone included all reasons for abortion,
asking the specific question first implied for the respondents that the second
question pertained only to abortion when no birth defects were likely. Consequently fewer respondents supported this more limited scenario. Likewise,
endorsement for freedom of speech increased when the question was immediately
preceded by a question of whether the Ku Klux Klan should have the right to
express its opinion in public (Ottati, Riggle, Wyer, Schwarz, & Kuklinski, 1989).
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
Having just expressed concerns about guaranteeing freedom of speech for the Ku
Klux Klan, respondents interpreted the general question to be about freedom of
speech for groups other than the Ku Klux Klan.
Interpreting More Meaning than the Researcher Intended: The Case of
Framing Effects Asking the same question twice forces respondents to find
another meaning for the second question. Similar are forced choices between
options that do not differ, as is standard procedure in decision making and in
particular framing. Participants are typically presented with two statistically
equal scenarios. For example, in the Asian disease problem in one scenario 200 out
of 600 survive whereas the other gives 1/3 probability that 600 survive and a
probability of 2/3 that nobody survives (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). Cooperative
participants may infer that the way the two scenarios are presented must represent some difference because, otherwise, asking which of two equal options one
prefers would make no sense. In other words, they give subjective meaning to an
otherwise absurd question.
Other framing effects involve simpler tasks. Often the alternatives are presented between groups and the way an option is framed still has a considerable
effect. For example, labeling ground beef as 75% lean made it more attractive to
consumers than labeling it as 25% fat (Levin & Gaeth, 1988). Likewise therapies
seem more acceptable when described in terms of survival rates as opposed to
mortality rates (e.g. Levin, Schnittjer, & Thee, 1988; McNeil, Pauker, Sox, &
Tversky, 1982). But as McKenzie and Nelson have pointed out (2003), although
formally equivalent both statements differ in their pragmatic meaning. Their
research showed that when the outcome of a new therapy lay above the previous
survival rate for a disease, a large majority of speakers chose to express this rate in
the survival frame (e.g. 25% survival). When the survival rate lay below a previous
reference point, they chose a mortality frame. In turn, listeners were sensitive to
the speakers’ choice of frame. When a treatment was described in terms of survival
rates, it was assumed to be better than a previous treatment compared to when the
mortality rate was given.
In this realm it is interesting to note that framing effects in the Asian disease
problem disappeared when the problem was presented as a statistical rather than a
medical problem (Bless, Betsch, & Franzen, 1998). In fact, when participants
considered the task as a statistical problem, either option was chosen by about
50%. This suggests that participants realized that both options were statistically
equivalent and chose at random. Presumably, choice of words was seen as less
diagnostic when the task was to calculate expected values. When perceived as a
medical problem, the choice of words presumably communicates reference points
of other treatments.
A speaker does not only choose slightly different words to express different
things. The way something is framed apparently also carries meaning, and research
participants and survey respondents seem more sensitive to such underlying
meanings than researchers. A similar example comes from comparative questions.
For example when asked whether traffic contributes more than industry or less
than industry to air pollution, 45% of the respondents thought traffic contributes
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more. When the question was framed differently and respondents were asked
whether industry contributes more than traffic or less than traffic to air pollution,
only 24% thought traffic was the main polluter (Wänke, 1996; Wänke, Schwarz, &
Noelle-Neumann, 1995). The reason for such asymmetric comparison judgment
lies in respondents focusing on the (grammatical) subject of the comparison and
neglecting the referent (Tversky, 1977). Why they do so is an open question, but
presumably they assume that the speaker chose this particular comparison object
as the subject because this is the target of interest. When people were asked to
phrase comparative questions about a target, they themselves chose this target as
the subject of the comparison and compared it to another object rather than vice
versa (Wänke, 2006). Likewise the asymmetry in comparative judgments following
from a focusing on the subject diminished when respondents were told that the
target of interest is the referent (Wänke, 2006). Focusing on what the question is
all about makes perfect sense.
If the Answer is Obvious – Why Ask? Reinterpreting Obvious Questions
Conversational norms not only forbid asking the same question twice unless one
requests a different answer. Neither would one ask questions to which one knows
the answer or to which both partners know the answer is self-evident. Being asked
whether Berlin or Gummersbach is the larger city would probably raise some
puzzlement and one may begin to wonder whether the question is referring to
physical size, because everyone knows that Berlin is bigger.
Possibly this violation of conversational rules is the basis of some manifestations of the conjunction fallacy, whereby the co-occurrence of two events is
estimated more likely than one event alone. For example, in the famous Linda
problem, most respondents guess that Linda is a bank teller and active in the
feminist movement rather than merely a bank teller (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983).
Yet,“Linda is a bank teller” comprises the more special case of Linda being a bank
teller and active in the feminist movement. Therefore logic clearly prescribes
that the more special subcategory cannot be more likely than the more general
superordinate category. It has been argued that research participants may be
aware of the triviality of the problem and therefore reinterpret the question to
make it less trivial (Dulaney & Hilton, 1991; Politzer & Noveck; 1991). They do
not expect to be asked such obviously nonsense questions and following the
cooperative principle try to find out what the researcher really means. As a result
they may infer that what is meant by “Linda is bank teller” is that Linda is a bank
teller and not active in the feminist movement.
Why Doubt a Question? The Case of Fictitious Questions and Presuppositions Yet another violation of the cooperativeness principle is asking about
non-existent events or objects. Asking your conversation partner about her opinion
on the “educational contribution” presupposes that such a thing exists. Furthermore it communicates that you expect her to know about its existence and to have
an opinion on it. Not so in research. In order to demonstrate that responses to
social and political surveys may not reflect informed and well-formed attitudes but
rather random responses (mental coin flips) which respondents make up in order
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
to avoid admitting ignorance, survey researchers assessed attitudes toward fictitious (or not well known) issues. If respondents reported an attitude rather than
admitted that the issue was unfamiliar to them, this was seen as evidence for the
random response. A closer look at the data however suggests that respondents did
not answer in a random fashion. Rather they seemed to have made sense of the
obscure issue in a very reasonable way by using other cues to give the issue a
meaning. For example, systematic research showed that respondents used previous topics in the questionnaire to interpret the unfamiliar topic. An “educational
contribution” was likely to be interpreted as money students have to pay for their
education when a previous question referred to tuition fees, but as a stipend for
students when the previous question had referred to stipends. Consequently the
proposal was rated as more favorable in the second context compared to the first
(Strack et al., 1991). Answers to an equally fictitious “Public Affairs Act” were
highly correlated with preceding questions about domestic issues (Bishop, Oldendick, Tuchfarber, & Bennett, 1980). Without a meaningful context, respondents
use their general knowledge to interpret ambiguous issues. Several studies showed
that respondents did not arbitrarily provide answers to questions about fictitious
issues but derived their opinions from other apparently relevant attitudes. For
example, opinions on the obscure Monetary Control Bill correlated with concern
about inflation (Schuman & Presser, 1981). Those concerned with inflation welcomed the bill, presumably because they interpreted it as an instrument to keep
inflation under control. Opinions toward the similarly obscure “Agricultural Trade
Act” correlated with one’s general attitude toward the government (Schuman &
Presser, 1981). Apparently, respondents in everyday conversations assumed that
the interviewer was asking them about an existing issue of which they could be
expected to have an opinion.
This principle that the researcher’s questions are taken with a guarantee of
validity also accounts for some of the astonishing effects in eyewitness research,
where merely asking a question may create memories. For example, Elizabeth
Loftus (1975) showed research participants a film and then asked them whether
they had seen a particular object or event (e.g. “did you see the children getting on
the school bus?”). Note that the participants had no reason to believe that there
had actually been no school bus and that the researcher led them astray. When
participants in such research settings were asked later, they often incorrectly
remembered the non-existent object they had earlier been asked for. These
findings have attained some publicity in the debate about planted and repressed
memory (Loftus & Bernstein, 2005). But planting memories may not be as easy as
it sounds; the reconstruction may depend on who asks the question. Witnesses are
more influenced when they have every reason to presume that the questioner is
knowledgeable about the event and unbiased. If so, they would trust the questions
to refer to accurate events. Memory biases were much rarer when witnesses had
reasons to mistrust the questions as misleading, for example when asked by a
defendant’s lawyer (Dodd & Bradshaw, 1980) or when the questioner was known
to be unfamiliar with the event (Smith & Ellsworth, 1987). In the latter case, the
presupposition in the question did not come with a guarantee of validity and was
therefore dismissed. Below, in the section on media reports, I will give other
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examples of how this assumption that questions pertain to valid occurrences can
also affect judgment rather than memory.
Moderating Conditions There has been little systematic research on condi-
tions that might moderate the influence of the cooperative principle on participants’
responses. One may easily assume that the more motivated respondents are to
cooperate, the more likely they will try to make sense of the materials, and the
more likely they may show effects as discussed. And clearly there may be differences in the ability to attend to others and to read cues. Two results support this
view. First, participants high in conversational skills were more likely to show the
conjunction fallacy (Slugoski & Wilson, 1998), which is in line with the perspective
of the conjunction fallacy being the result of a question reinterpretation. Second, it
was found that individuals with an interdependent self-concept, who should be
more sensitive to conversational norms, also differentiated more between two
seemingly related and adjacent questions than individuals with an independent
self-concept (Haberstroh, Oyserman, Schwarz, & Kühnen, 2002).
Summary and Appraisal What this research perspective points out is that
many of the classic findings in judgment and decision making may be less due to
cognitive bias and shortcomings in human judgment and information processing
that to a communicative bias: Participants adhere to conversational norms where
they are not appropriate. Research participants act as cooperative communicators
who assume that all information in the situation is valid and relevant and therefore
take it all into account. Likewise survey respondents do their best to find out what
information is requested and provide this information. Not surprisingly, in their
quest to find meaning, they are influenced by all kinds of seemingly (in the eyes of
the researcher) irrelevant features such as previous questions or response scales.
However, for a cooperative communicator these features are anything but irrelevant because they give crucial information as to what exactly the researcher wants
to know. Rather than response “errors”, order effects, scale effects, or effects of
question wording reflect respondents as thinking and socially adept human beings.
As valid as this perspective has been proven and as impressive as its evidence
sounds, it should be pointed out that Gricean reinterpretations cannot account
entirely for the biases identified in judgment and decision making (for a discussion
see Shafir & Le Boeuf, 2002). Only rarely did the undermining of conversational
norms wipe out the effects completely. Significant reductions attested to some
contribution but in many cases the effects were still significant. One should thus
not declare 30 years of research invalid merely on Gricean accounts – but maybe it
is safe to say that the effects have been inflated to an unknown degree. The more
important lesson from this research is, however, to take the cooperative principle
into account when planning and conducting research.
A final observation may be in order. I have sketched several studies where in
order to undermine the maxim of relevance participants were explicitly told that
the information was selected at random or may not be diagnostic. Assuming the
maxim of relevance, participants now will have to discount this information unless
they are uncooperative. But to discount it they may have to find out first how they
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
would normally use it and then correct their judgment. Suppose a participant
would not infer any meaning from the order in which arguments in a two-sided
message are given. Now the researcher announces that the order is chosen at
random. This implies for the participant to consider how order might have an
effect if it were not chosen at random. Apparently order is important, otherwise
the researcher would not have pointed out not to rely on it. Once the participant
has arrived at a theory of how order may influence the judgment, he or she will try
to correct for this influence. Presumably, telling participants to discount any
information even if it normally has no effect may alter the judgments because
participants are likely to produce a theory on how to correct their judgment. To the
extent that this occurs, the influence of undermining the cooperativeness itself
may be inflated.
Pragmatic Implicatures in Mass Communication
The examples from research settings have shown that even outside of natural
conversations people use the cooperative principle as a general framework to
interpret the meaning of communication. Another example of non-natural conversations where the cooperative principle may be used to generate meaning is
mass communication. However, the implications of the cooperative principle
can vary between different fields, depending on the presumed purpose of the
communication. In the field of advertising the purpose is to persuade the audience,
whereas the purpose of media reports is to inform an audience of new information.
Consequently, the rule “if it is presented it must be relevant” would signal
potential persuasiveness of a statement in the advertising context but potential
newsworthiness in the news context.
Advertising Advertising and marketing are domains where recipients probably
do not always assume that statements are true and valid. Although consumers may
not suspect explicit lying, many consumers mistrust advertising claims or show at
least some caution (e.g. Shavitt, Lowrey, & Haefner, 1998). Whether consumers
hedge doubts about the truth of advertising or not, they know that the goal of
advertising is to influence them. Paradoxically, it is exactly this knowledge of the
communication goal that enables implicatures in advertising statements – and thus
possibly deception.
Grice’s maxim of relation requires contributions to be relevant to the accepted
purpose of the communication. In advertising, the obvious and accepted purpose
is to persuade recipients of the benefits and advantages of the advertised good. If
this is the accepted goal, then consumers should interpret any statement, whether
it be obscure, incomplete, or ambiguous, in a favorable manner to the advertised
product. The underlying inference rule is: If an advertiser presents this claim in
order to persuade me, then the claim must signal a benefit. The following will give
some examples of such implicatures in advertising.
Inferring Benefits from Incomplete Information Advertising statements
may contain claims or benefits, on the one hand, and supporting data or what
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advertisers call the “reason why” on the other hand. Examples for benefits are that
the product is healthy, makes hair shiny, shrinks pores, etc. As for why it does
so, any product attribute or combination of product attributes may be given.
Quite often an ingredient (oat bran; enzymes) or the manufacturing process
(hand-made; organically grown) is given to support the claimed benefit but any
attribute will do. Of course, these attributes should only support the claimed
benefit if consumers see a link between the two. For example “yoghurt X has a rich
and creamy flavor (benefit) because it is made of whole milk (reason why)” is
credible if consumers believe that whole milk makes for a rich flavor. “Yoghurt X
has a rich flavor because it comes in glass containers” does not seem particularly
convincing at first glance, unless consumers believe that glass containers are
beneficial to flavor. One would expect then that advertising would only use such
attributes as reasons where the implications are clear, or that they would educate
the consumers on why a particular attribute has a particular benefit. However,
as Areni (2002) pointed out, a much used rhetoric form in advertising, the enthymeme, lacks this link or conditional rule between attributes (data) and benefit.
Consider the following example taken from Areni (2002; p. 179).
By combining 2 liquids that activate to form a foam, New Liquid Plumr
Foaming Pipe Snake cleans your pipe walls quickly and easily.
Here, the benefit “effective pipe cleaning” is supported by a single attribute
“foam”. Why foam should be particularly efficient for cleaning pipes is, however,
not said. The link between data and benefit is missing. This is where pragmatic
implicatures come into play. According to the maxim of relation, one should
only give information that is relevant to the point one wants to make. Therefore
presenting any attributes in an advert – whose goal is to claim a particular benefit –
implicates a link between these attributes and the benefit. As Areni put it, “Grice’s
prescription dictates that presenting data conversationally implicates a conditional
rule, and it is this principle that allows enthymemes to be transformed into
coherent arguments” (p.179).
Note that sometimes the link between attributes and benefit pertains to beliefs
that consumers already have, for example that full milk gives yoghurt a rich flavor.
The “Liquid Plumr” example illustrates however that merely by presenting data
and benefits together consumers may newly form such associations. Here, consumers implicitly learn that foam is efficient for cleaning pipes. In this respect,
the example “yoghurt X has a rich flavor because it comes in glass containers” may
not turn out so incredible after all. Consumers might start to believe that glass
containers enable a rich flavor – or why else would the advertiser say so.
Enthymemes are incomplete insofar that they do not account for why a
particular attribute supports the benefit. Conversational implicatures fill this
missing link. This strategy may even be drawn one step further. Quite often
products advertise certain features or attributes although no explanation or benefit
is given. Consider a body lotion featuring “with Recitin” in bold letters on the
package. What Recitin is and what it is good for is not known. For all we know it
may be harmful. Nevertheless, because consumers expect that what is conveyed
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
in an advert is relevant to product quality they are likely to infer positive benefits
no matter how obscure the attributes. If a feature is advertised it must signal a
benefit, otherwise the marketers would not emphasize it. Several studies support
this assumption (Wänke & Friese, 2006). For example, consumers were shown a
body lotion featuring “with Recitin” – a fictitious ingredient – quite prominently
on the package. These consumers then believed that body lotions that contain
Recitin were healthier, better for the skin, and generally of better quality than
body lotions that did not contain Recitin. In another study, participants estimated
higher prices and were willing to pay higher prices for products that claimed
obscure attributes compared to no attribute information. Real world examples are
plenty: detergent with active oxygen, yoghurt with acidophylis bacteria, sun-screen
lotion with PABA, anti-aging cream with fructo-enzymes, etc. Of course, this may
present itself as an attractive and versatile marketing strategy: Let the consumers
come up with something they find believable.
Note that according to this logic the absence of a feature if advertised in
bold letters would also signal a benefit, otherwise the marketer would rather hide
the lack. And indeed consumers who had seen a body lotion featuring the claim
“without Recitin” rated body lotions that contain Recitin less favorably compared
to body lotions that were free of Recitin. Estimated prices and willingness to
pay were also higher compared to a control group that saw no claims when the
products claimed the lack of the respective attributes (Wänke & Friese, 2006).
Whether a product advertised the presence or the absence of an obscure feature,
both enhanced the product’s estimated price and what consumers were willing to
pay. In principle, marketers could just invent an obscure feature and advertise the
absence of it in their products: “guaranteed enzyme-free”, “no artificial bacteria”,
“has not been processed over 25 degrees Celsius”. Given that consumers have no
knowledge about an ingredient and its benefits, they infer its significance from the
fact that it is advertised and therefore meant to persuade them. If a marketer
emphasizes that a brand contains X, then X must be good or in principle a feature
that enhances the brand’s attractiveness. If, however, marketers stress that the
brand does not contain X, this lack of ingredient must be an advantage, otherwise
they would not highlight it. The same also applies to quantifiers. Consumers are
quite often ignorant about what constitutes high or low amounts or degrees of a
feature. As mentioned above they can easily be misled by labels such as 25% fat or
75% lean (Levin & Gaeth, 1988; Sanford, Fay, Stewart, & Moxey, 2002). Again,
however, if what is advertised signals benefits then even arbitrary numbers may
become meaningful. When featured prominently on a package of a diet or “light”
product 25% fat is likely to be interpreted as low, particularly when phrased as
“only 25% fat” (see also Moxey & Sanford, 2000).
A third form of presenting incomplete information and relying on recipients’
own inferences are incomplete comparisons. Claims like “brand X shampoo leaves
hair shinier” are common in advertising. Consumers are likely to conclude that
brand X leaves hair shinier than (all) other brands (Shimp, 1978). This however is
not stated. In fact, brand X might leave hair only shinier than no shampoo would
or, worse yet, soap would. Again, consumers implicitly assume the claim to be
informative and relevant (and true in that case), a requirement that is best fulfilled
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by a meaningful comparison standard such as another brand but not by obvious or
ridiculous comparisons.
Inferences about Competitors So far I have only considered implicatures
regarding the advertised product. The above examples however also illustrate a
second implicature. Claiming that brand X does not contain enzymes may not only
lead consumers to infer that enzymes are undesirable but also that other brands
may contain enzymes (which is undesirable). Likewise of course, highlighting
a particular feature may suggest that other brands do not have this feature. In
this way, advertising may be misleading. For example, advertising avocados as
cholesterol free is, although true, misleading because consumers may falsely infer
that other fruits do contain cholesterol. Consider the advert in Figure 8.1. At
first glance this advert may seem to reflect a weird sense of humor. Normally
restaurants do not serve dogs, cats, rats, or worms. This advert, however, was taken
from a tourist magazine in South East Asia, where tourists may be willing to
believe that restaurants might serve all of the above. If so this advert will certainly
strengthen that belief. A claim of a dog-free cuisine would hardly be necessary if
that were normal in this part of the world. So the advert becomes informative in
two respects: this restaurant does not serve dog but other restaurants do. The
advert also has a double meaning. Recipients who know that tourist restaurants in
Cambodia are unlikely to serve dogs will find the advert amusing as it mocks the
stereotype. It suggests – or pretends to suggest – that there are people who believe
that Cambodian restaurants might serve dogs and it is thus entertaining for those
who know better.
Two-Sided or Negative Messages In advertising, two-sided messages increase
credibility. Moreover, unfavorable information may enhance the product appeal
compared to one-sided messages if the unfavorable information supports the implications of the favorable one (Bohner, Einwiller, Erb, & Siebler, 2003; Pechmann,
1992). For example, the headline in the Nikon advert in Figure 8.2 below claims
the camera is “too big, heavy, complicated, and expensive”. The finer print reveals
that the camera is made for professional photographers who need more versatility,
better materials, and more advanced technology than amateur photographers,
which makes the camera also a bit bigger, heavier, more complicated, and more
expensive. Here, the negative and positive attributes are correlated and as a whole
the advert becomes more credible.
Possibly, the recipients’ expectation that whatever is conveyed in an advert
should be persuasive contributes to this effect. Assuming that advertising information is meant to increase the appeal of the product, recipients may be particularly
prone to interpret negative product information positively. If the unfavorable
product information were encountered in a different context where recipients
expect a different communication purpose, for example the same headline as in
the advert in a consumer report, the unfavorable information may decrease a
product’s attractiveness. Consider an advert for a chili sauce saying “Warning:
Unbearably hot”. Then consider the same verdict given by a food magazine’s
taste testing. Clearly the statement coming from the second source may be
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
FIGURE 8.1
Advertisement 1: Example of implicatures about competitors.
considered as a warning to stay away from the sauce whereas coming from the
marketer it is not at all considered literally. No marketers in their right mind
would seriously deter consumers from their product. Hence, the statement is not
to be taken literally as a warning but rather as an allure for spicy food lovers.
Within the context of advertising, two-sided and negative messages may thus
represent an efficient communication strategy because the recipients reinterpret
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FIGURE 8.2 Advertisement 2: Example of two-sided messages in advertising (reproduced with permission).
the presumably negative attributes. Yet the order of presentation may also be
crucial.
The Order of Arguments As mentioned above, conversational norms would
suggest presenting the more important – in this case the favorable information –
last. Later arguments are seen as more important in two-sided messages, because
recipients may infer that if the first argument was all there is to say the communicator may have left it at that. Apparently, the communicator is giving vital
information; otherwise adding information would violate the conversational rule to
be brief and informative. Studies that varied the order in two-sided messages
found indeed that the later argument was considered as more important for the
communicator (Krosnick et al., 1990) and was also more persuasive (Igou & Bless,
2003b). Note however that theses studies only investigated the impact of arguments
that had really opposite implications but not adverts where the negative arguments
were actually meant to convey positive information. Bohner and his colleagues
(2003) presented the negative arguments last in the restaurant advert but found
no negative impact. One may only wonder whether a reversal would even show
a larger advantage compared to a one-sided message or whether in two-sided
advertising the order of the negative and positive arguments does not matter
because all are interpreted favorably anyway.
Two-sided advertising, even if it is only rhetorical, is however the exception.
Usually all arguments are favorable. Nevertheless, when more than one argument
is presented the arguments may vary in strength. This renders the question about
the best sequence of presenting them. Should one begin with the strongest and
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
most compelling feature or save the best for last? Primacy and recency accounts
from information processing make different predictions depending on other
conditions. Communicative aspects also allow for contradictory predictions. On
the one hand, one may argue that because according to conversational norms
contributions should be relevant, informative, and brief, the most important
information should be placed at the beginning. One the other hand, one may
equally argue that if the initially presented information was all there is to say one
may just stop there, therefore the later information would be more important.
Although the latter prediction was supported for two-sided communication as
mentioned above, for one-sided messages the former hypothesis was supported.
An audience seems to expect a communicator to present the strong arguments at
the beginning (Igou & Bless, 2003b). Moreover, persuasion was higher when
stronger arguments were presented first and the weaker arguments last rather
than vice versa (Igou & Bless, 2003b; Unnava, Burnkraut, & Erevelles, 1994).
Are Advertising Implicatures Effective? Paradoxically, knowing about
the advert’s persuasive purpose may make recipients particularly susceptible
because they might interpret any statement, whether positive, obscure, or even
negative, as intended favorably. The question however remains whether conversational implicatures are more successful than direct assertions. Some evidence
suggests that they may be at least not inferior to direct assertions (Harris, 1977;
Harris, Pounds, Majorelle, & Mermis, 1993)4 and one may speculate when they
are actually superior. Harris and his colleagues (1977, 1993) pitted assertion
commercials against different types of implication commercials. For example, the
assertion commercial read “. . . . Taking Eradicold Pills as directed will get you
through a winter without colds” whereas the implication commercial juxtaposed
imperatives to imply a causal connection “Get through a winter without colds.
Take Eradicold Pills as directed”. When later asked whether the advert had stated
a causal relationship, recipients saw little difference between the two versions
in particular after a delay. When it came to purchase decisions, implied claims
were just as successful as asserted claims (Harris, 1977) or even more successful
(Harris et al., 1993). Moreover, evidence from another domain suggests that
self-generated inferences from adverts are particularly effective in that they
are recalled better (Moore, Reardon, & Durso, 1986) and are more persuasive
(Sawyer & Howard, 1991).
Explicitly presented claims have the disadvantage that consumers are likely to
scrutinize them critically, even more so if they are generally rather skeptical about
advertising. Lengthy and complicated explanations why a particular feature brings
a particular benefit may sound unconvincing unless they are self-evident. Areni
(2002) therefore suggests – although he has not tested his hypothesis yet – that
plausible links between a feature and a benefit should be stated, but implausible
and less obvious ones are better implied by enthymemes.
One should note that even skeptical consumers do not mistrust all advertising
statements equally. Consumer researchers distinguish between search attributes,
experience attributes, and credence attributes (Darby & Karni, 1973; Nelson,
1974). Whereas before consumption the choice was based on search attributes
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(price, brand, product design, and attributes), experience attributes, such as taste
or comfort, are available only after product trial, and credence attributes, such as
reliability, require a long-term usage. Note that in contrast to experience attributes, which are by definition of subjective nature, most search attributes are, at
least in principle, objectively verifiable. Their verifiability would predict that they
tend to be true because the market and legal regulations would punish untruthful
marketers. Accordingly, consumers tend to be more skeptical of claims regarding
experience attributes such as taste compared to claims about search attributes
(Ford, Smith, & Swasy, 1990). By and large, consumers trust that the product
contains the features listed on the package and other verifiable claims. They would
not believe that marketers would lie so obviously. If the advert says the margarine
contains alphabetamins that is hardly doubted. What may be doubted is that
alphabetamins give a boost of energy and improve one’s health. Thus, it may be
better to let consumers make those inferences by themselves rather than explicitly
state them. When advertising mere features without claiming benefits, the actual
benefit is left to the imagination of the consumer. This makes for a very versatile
strategy. The feature does whatever the consumer wants to believe.
Quite likely indirect or implied claims have yet another advantage. Marketers
may be able to implicate what they could not say explicitly without being challenged legally or otherwise. A statement “leaves hair shinier than all other brands”
would certainly be challenged by competitors. In some countries advertisers
would be required to give some evidence to prove their claim. Not so for the
statement “leaves hair shinier”. Advertisers cannot be accused of deception if all
they do is advertise a certain feature and leave it to the consumer to infer why it is
favorable.
In summary, implicated benefits seem to be a highly effective advertising
strategy. Some of the assumptions and suggestions discussed here were of course
speculative and need further empirical testing. However, if we assume that the
market provides some kind of test, then at least some of the strategies seem to fare
rather well in the real world.
Media Reports “Can media questions become public answers?” Merely
phrasing this question would suggest that the answer is “yes”. At least this was the
conclusion of a highly influential research article (Wegener, Wenzlaff, Kerker, &
Beattie, 1981). In this research, newspaper headlines in the form of incriminating
questions (Is Karen Downing Associated With Fraudulent Charity?) led to equally
negative evaluations of a person as an assertive headline (Karen Downing Associated With Fraudulent Charity). Although different accounts are possible, one
explanation is that media recipients apply the cooperative principle when interpreting media messages. Such a question as “Is Karen Downing associated with
fraudulent charity?” could be answered either with yes or no, and therefore there
may seem nothing wrong with merely asking the question. At least this is the
media’s defense argument. But the question acquires an added meaning when
posed in the context of a newspaper headline. The purpose of the newspaper is
to inform readers of new events and developments. Based on this assumption
readers would infer from such a headline that new evidence appeared that makes
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
this question plausible. Completely off the wall assumptions would hardly make
headlines, at least not in the serious media. The underlying inference rule here is
that if it is reported in the news it must be informative and new for a general
audience.
Such an assumption would also explain pragmatic interpretations of newspaper
assertions and denials (Gruenfeld & Wyer, 1992). When a statement that was
a priori not believed (e.g. The CIA is currently involved in illegal drug trafficking)
was presented as a newspaper headline, its credibility increased just as if it were
presented from a reference source (encyclopedia, almanac, etc.). This may be
considered an indicator for people’s trust that the media speaks the truth. However,
the credibility of the statement increased just the same when the newspaper
headline denied the statement, whereas denials in reference sources did not
increase credibility significantly. Presumably, when media recipients encounter a
statement that is congruent with their former beliefs (The CIA is not involved in
illegal drug trafficking), they may begin wondering why the seemingly uninformative and redundant statement was made. In turn, this may lead them to infer that
there are reasons that make the denial necessary, one of them being that there
may be some truth to the accusation. Consequently, their belief in the proposition
is heightened. Gruenfeld and Wyer (1992) argue that reference sources whose
primary purpose is to record archival knowledge would invoke pragmatic interpretations to a lesser degree and readers would rely on the semantic implications.
Therefore denials in reference sources would lead readers to believe the proposition rather than its denial. This assumption, although in line with the obtained
results, is not entirely convincing at first glance. After all, why should an encyclopedia record a denial unless there was a reason, for example countering a widespread but false belief. Possibly, readers trusted the truth of reference sources
more, whereas for media headlines some doubts remained. Interestingly, although
denials in reference sources did not increase the credibility of the denied propositions, they nevertheless increased the credibility of related propositions (e.g. The
CIA has been involved in illegal drug dealing in the past). Apparently readers did
interpret the denial as evidence that there was some truth to the fact, otherwise a
denial would not be necessary. The effect also works the other way around. A
newspaper headline that affirms a proposition, which readers do believe anyway
(e.g. Republican congressmen belong to elitist country clubs), may decrease
beliefs in its validity, although these effects are less robust.
Clearly this research illustrates how printing the truth and nothing but the
truth may still create false impressions. How pragmatic interpretations may influence opinions is also suggested by other examples. Imagine a headline “Not all
American college students drive American cars”. Although media reports may give
statistics and facts for facts’ sake, one known purpose of the media is to draw the
public’s attention to undesirable and (less so) desirable states of affairs. Hence,
a pragmatic interpretation would also affect the inferred desirability and thus
readers’ attitudes. In line with these considerations, exposure to the above statement increased recipients’ beliefs that more college students should drive American
cars, and this effect was greater when the source was a newspaper rather than
a reference volume (Gruenfeld & Wyer, 1992). When it appears in a newspaper
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headline the phrasing “not all students” is not interpreted as a descriptive figure
any longer but rather as an indicator of an undesirable state.
It may not even take such loaded phrases as “not all”, which are probably
suggestive in most contexts. Imagine that according to a statistic 35% of children
under 16 play an instrument. Unless one has some benchmark statistics at hand, it
is unclear whether that number is high or low. Now imagine a headline “More than
a third of children under 16 play an instrument” vs. “Less than 40% of children
under 16 play an instrument”. A media recipient would not assume that the reference points of “a third” and “40%” are chosen arbitrarily but that these are the
critical benchmarks known to the writers of the news article (see also McKenzie &
Nelson, 2003). After all, the fact that this statistic is given in the news implies that
it represents a deviation from some standard or expectation, otherwise it would
hardly be noteworthy. By the comparative phrasing the direction of the deviation
is communicated as well and the recipient gets the impression that the incidence
rate is high in the first headline but low in the second one (Teigen, Halberg, &
Fostervold, in press). One may further imagine that the second headline is more
suitable in raising money for public music education than the first.
Summary The postulate that “communicated information comes with a guar-
antee of relevance” (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) may take different forms. Advertising
claims come with a guarantee that the claim is favorable for the consumer; news
items come with the guarantee that the item is informative to a general audience,
noteworthy, and possibly important. What is intriguing about this perspective is
the reversal of dynamics. According to most persuasion models, one would expect
that persuasion is the result of being presented with favorable information. The
present perspective suggests however that an argument may be perceived as
favorable merely because it is part of a persuasion attempt. Likewise, a fact may
become noteworthy merely because it is presented in the news.
CONCLUSION
Grice’s (1975) principle of cooperation is the key to understand meaning not only
in natural conversations but in many other, artificial and technical, communication
settings. It is the key to understand irony and teasing, and it is exploited in mass
communication and marketing. It leads research participants astray in standardized research settings where they inappropriately adhere to it. But although it
represents a valuable rule to generate meaning, it is not sufficient. As has been
discussed, the cooperative principle has different implications depending on the
purpose of the communication. Hence, knowing the purpose is a crucial requirement for inferences. In addition, other knowledge and cues, such as being familiar
with the speaker’s background or shared cultural knowledge, may be necessary. In
the beginning of the chapter I suggested that Joe bear could have figured out
the meaning of Irving’s comment about the beehive had he – or the computer
program TALESPIN – only known that Irving was cooperative. The reliance on
conversational norms may not guard against all misunderstandings, however, as is
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
illustrated by the next story that TALESPIN produced. Understanding now that
beehive is a reasonable answer, Joe did not beat up Irving anymore but instead
went and ate the beehive.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
That people are often led astray by judging the likelihood of an event by the ease
with which instances come to mind (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973).
To be exact, close others may also feel offended if present.
Where possible I will present recent research not covered in the previous reviews.
Many other studies have shown the effectiveness of implied claims but they refer to
different types of implications (e.g. Burke, DeSarbo, & Robertson, 1988; Russo,
Metcalf, & Stephens, 1981; Searleman & Carter, 1988).
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