“I’d Like You to Do Us a Favor”

One of the critical issues during Donald Trump's first impeachment trial was the meaning of his statement "I'd like you to do us a favor though," made to the President of Ukraine. Perceptions of this utterance were generally aligned with one's political orientation. Democrats, far more than Republicans, viewed it as a tit-for-tat exchange (or conditional offer in our research), and hence evidence of an impeachable offense. Similarly, liberals and conservatives have been found to differ in their interpretation of the phrases Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. Why?

Obviously, political motivations and beliefs explain a large part of these differences. But possibly not all.  In our research, we have been examining how people differ in their interpretation of conversation remarks, and one set of studies that we've conducted suggests that liberals and conservatives may differ in this regard. 

Understanding what someone means by what they say is a complex process. For example, we must identify referents (e.g., Who does "he" in "He's coming tomorrow" refer to?) and time frames (e.g., What is the meaning of "soon" in "I'll be there soon"?), and most importantly, we have to identify what deeper meaning the speaker might intend with an utterance. And here there is the potential for misunderstanding because a speaker's meaning or intention is richer than the literal sentence meaning. Therefore, interpretive processes must come into play in order to recognize the speaker's intent. Metaphors, indirect requests, backhanded compliments, hints, and so on all require inferences on the part of the recipient.

In our research, we have begun to explore individual differences in the interpretation of conversation remarks, or speaker meaning, and most recently we have been focusing on how political orientation might be associated with such differences. Prior research suggests differences in cognitive style between liberals and conservatives. Liberals, relative to conservatives, tend to have higher levels of need for cognition, cognitive flexibility, and prefer reflection over intuition. In terms of language use, research suggests that conservatives tend to prefer a less complex and more concrete communication style. These patterns suggest that liberals will be more likely than conservatives to engage in the inferential processing required to recognize indirect meaning.

To test this, we created a conversation between two male businessmen that contained five different indirect remarks. For example, one of the indirect remarks was an indirect reply, or failure to directly answer a question about one's opinion. In our conversation, the indirect reply "It's hard to give a good presentation" occurred in response to the question "What did you think of my presentation?" In this situation, the recipient (and observers) will likely reason that the speaker is conveying a negative opinion of the presentation, an interpretation that requires reading between the lines. We asked liberals and conservatives to rate the likelihood of an indirect interpretation for each of the five different types of indirect utterances, as well as two utterances that were more straightforward. In three studies, liberals were significantly more likely to endorse the indirect interpretations of these utterances than were conservatives. There was no difference between liberals and conservatives in the interpretation of the control utterances. We examined possible explanations for this effect. We found that people who scored higher on a measure of empathy were more likely to perceive these indirect meanings, but this failed to account for the difference associated with political orientation. As well, these differences held when we controlled for education level, gender, and age.

To test for generalizability, we created a different conversation, one that involved female (rather than male) interactants conversing in a different setting (teachers discussing their work rather than businessmen). This conversation was much longer and included 21 different indirect utterances, and we created an audio version as well as a written version. Participants read or listened to this conversation and judged the meaning of the indirect remarks. Again, liberals were more likely to endorse the indirect meanings than were conservatives.

Our results suggest that people vary in their sensitivity to the nuances of communication.  Sometimes, these differences don't matter, but at other times they may have profound interpersonal consequences. Although our focus has been on these differences as a function of political orientation, we suspect that other individual difference variables will be related as well, an issue that we are currently pursuing. Exploring these differences, we hope, will contribute to an understanding of how people can come away from the same conversation with different interpretations of what was said and meant.

For Further Reading

Bašnáková, J., Weber, K., Petersson, K. M., van Berkum, J., & Hagoort, P. (2014). Beyond the language given: The neural correlates of inferring speaker meaning. Cerebral Cortex, 24(10), 2572–2578. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bht112

Holtgraves, T., & Bray, K. (2022).  U.S. liberals and conservatives live in different (linguistic) worlds: Ideological differences when interpreting business conversations.  Journal of Applied Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12930

Holtgraves, T. M. (2013). Language as social action: Social psychology and language use. Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410601773

Pinker, S., Nowak, M. A., & Lee, J. J. (2008). The logic of indirect speech.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(3), 833-838. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0707192105

Thomas Holtgraves is a professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University.  He conducts research on various facets of communication and language use.