Illusory Transparency of Intention

Illusory Transparency of Intention

People can mistake an ambiguous expression for one whose meaning is obvious. A related illusion concerns the speaker’s intention: we assume a listener can see what the speaker meant. David Olson and colleagues showed that 5-year-old children are subject to the illusion of the transparency of speakers’ intentions (Olson, & Torrance, 1987). In that experiment, children were told that Lucy had two pairs of red shoes: one new and one old. Then Lucy, who wanted the new pair, asked Linus to bring her “the red shoes.” Linus, who did not know that she wanted the new shoes, guessed and brought the wrong pair. The children in the study were surprised that he did not bring her the shoes that she had in mind. They behaved as if the ambiguous phrase “the red shoes” uniquely identified the shoes she intended him to bring. They behaved as if Lucy’s intention was transparent.

As it turns out, adults tend to behave precisely like Olson’s children (Keysar, 1993; 1994). Imagine that June recommends a restaurant for dinner to her friend Mark. He goes there and hates the food. He then calls June and leaves a recorded message: “June, I just finished dinner at the restaurant you recommended, and I must say, it was marvelous, just marvelous.” Mark is clearly being sarcastic, but what would June think he meant? You know what he meant because you know he hated the dinner, but she does not have this information. You would experience an illusion of transparency if you attribute the perception of sarcasm to June because you know that Mark was sarcastic.

To test this, we presented people with the story about Mark and June and then played back the message he supposedly left on her answering machine (Keysar, 1994; Keysar & Baldwin, under review). However, the story was of two kinds. Mark either hated the food or he really liked it; other than that, the information in the story was identical and everyone heard exactly the same answering machine message. Although Mark had different intentions in the two versions, people’s evaluation of June’s perception should not vary. If they really take June’s perspective – if they consider information that is available to her – then they should give the same answer in both cases. Instead, people were more likely to say that June perceived sarcasm when they knew he was being sarcastic than when they knew he was being sincere. This is precisely what one would expect if people take utterances as transparent – they behave as if the intention is obvious from what the speaker says.

As it turns out, the reason readers took Mark’s intention as transparent is that he wanted June to perceive that intention. Keysar (1998) added a condition where the speaker’s attitude was negative but he wanted to conceal it. In this case, Mark hated the restaurant, but he did not want June to know that. He wanted to spare her feelings because she recommended the restaurant. So he left her the same message, “. . ., it was marvelous, just marvelous.” With this condition, participants no longer thought that June would perceive sarcasm, even though the event was negative. They were just as likely to predict that she would perceive sarcasm when he attempted to conceal his negative experience as when he had a positive experience and was truly sincere. So participants took Mark’s communicative intention as transparent. It was as if they assumed that June would perceive whatever intention Mark wanted her to perceive.

Such an illusion of transparency could result from construal (e.g., Ross, 1990). Once we interpret an ambiguous behavior, we construe the behavior in terms of the interpretation and eventually we perceive it as unambiguous. When people knew Mark intended to be sarcastic, they reported that the repetition of “marvelous” clearly conveyed his sarcasm. When they knew he was being sincere, they reported that the repetition only underscored how much he really enjoyed it. Similarly, pauses in Mark’s message were interpreted as either pregnant with sarcasm in one case or merely breathing breaks in the other. Clearly, when one construes the utterance in a particular way, it appears to include sufficient cues for the intended meaning, so that even the uninformed should be able to figure it out. The way the cognitive system construes ambiguity is a particular constraint that gives rise to an illusion of transparency in language use.

We further suggest that the illusory transparency we documented results from an anchoring and adjustment process. We assume that observers anchor in the intention of the speaker (Mark) and then insufficiently adjust to the uninformed addressee’s perspective. To test this, we manipulated the amount of time participants were allotted to respond. Indeed, when participants answered at their leisure, the illusion of transparency was smaller than when they were hurried. Because adjustment takes time, the less time people have to complete the task, the more anchored they would be in the speaker’s actual intention.

Similarly, the experiment provided another source of evidence for an anchoring and adjustment mechanism. It showed that responses that reflect a more complete adjustment take longer than those that are closer to the anchor points. According to an anchoring and adjustment account, if participants attribute to June the perception of sincerity when Mark is sarcastic, they must have adjusted. Indeed, participants responded more slowly when they indicated that June would not perceive intended sarcasm than when they indicated that she would. The opposite was true when Mark was being sincere. It took longer to attribute the perception of sarcasm to June than the perception of a sincere intent. Precisely those responses that we predict would require adjustment took longer.

Our studies converge with Gilovich, Savitsky, and Medvec’s (1998) and Gilovich and Savitsky’s (1999) studies that documented a related illusion of transparency – the illusion that one’s own internal states, such as private preferences or emotions, are accessible to uninformed others. They showed that the illusion results from anchoring on one’s own internal states and not adjusting sufficiently to the perspective of others. In our studies, observers judging June’s perspective thought another person’s intentions shone through. In these related studies, people perceived their own internal states as relatively transparent.