Cooperation and Perspective Taking

COOPERATION AND PERSPECTIVE TAKING

Research on language use makes strong normative assumptions. It assumes that people adhere to certain normative rules of conversation to avoid misunderstanding. Grice (1975) argued that language users follow these rules and assume that others do too because conversation is governed by a “cooperative principle.” Clark and colleagues (e.g., Clark, 1996; Clark & Carlson, 1981; Clark & Marshall, 1981; Greene, Gerrig, McKoon & Ratcliff, 1994) argue that for conversation to be truly cooperative, the production and comprehension of linguistic utterances should be governed by mutual knowledge – by information that interlocutors know they share. Thus, cooperative speakers should design utterances bearing in mind the other’s thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, and so on. This is known as the principle of optimal design. Addressees, in turn, should assume that speakers’ utterances are optimally designed for them in this way. In short, the cooperative interlocutor should take into account the other’s perspective.

For example, when your annoyed friend says to you, “Nice job,” after you wrecked her car, you interpret her utterance with respect to information that is mutually known: You both know that you wrecked her car, that a car is an expensive item, that people are rarely happy when they lose their means of transportation, and so on. Together with the principle of optimal design, these mutually held beliefs are the “context” for understanding her intended meaning. They allow you to make the inference that “Nice job” is intended as sarcasm rather than praise.

Rather than pursuing a technical discussion of “mutual knowledge,” we discuss the more general notion of perspective taking. By perspective taking, we refer to people’s attempts to take into account not only what they know to be mutually held beliefs, but also what they assume their partner believes from his or her perspective.

If everyone held the exact same beliefs and assumptions about the world, all perspectives would be identical and there would be no reason to assume that interlocutors should observe the principle of optimal design. Every piece of information would already be mutual by definition. The only reason to assume that interlocutors should follow this principle is because perspectives differ.

The realization that other perspectives differ from our own develops early in life. Between the ages of 3 and 4, children realize that although they might have a certain belief, others might have a different belief – which is false – about the same state of affairs. The ability of children to distinguish between their own true beliefs and others’ false beliefs has been demonstrated in the now classic “false belief” paradigm (e.g., Astington, Harris, & Olson, 1988; Gopnik, & Wellman, 1992; Leslie, 1987; Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987; Wellman, 1990). In a typical false-belief task, a child is presented with a box that contains candy. The child sees the candy and also sees that Sally sees the candy in the box. Then Sally leaves. In front of the child, the experimenter then replaces the candy with pencils and closes the box so one cannot tell what it contains. Sally returns to the room. The child is asked what Sally thinks is in the box. Children younger than 3 years tend to say that Sally will think the box contains pencils. Once they develop a more adult-like understanding of the other’s mind, they realize that Sally will probably falsely believe the box has candy, not pencils. What they develop is an appreciation of differences in perspective.

Because this ability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and the perspectives of others emerges early in life, it makes sense that people would use it in conversation, as the principle of optimal design suggests they should. However, the mere fact that people have the ability does not mean that they necessarily use it. In fact, in laboratory studies we find that this principle is violated across the board in the use of language – by speakers, addressees, and overhearers alike. We show that instead of following this normative principle, people use heuristic processing to resolve ambiguity.