Respect the code: Speakers expect novel conventions to generalize within but not across social group boundaries

Robert D. Hawkins, Irina Liu, Adele E. Goldberg, Thomas L. Griffiths

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Speakers use different language to communicate with partners in different communities. But how do we learn and represent which conventions to use with which partners? In this paper, we argue that solving this challenging computational problem requires speakers to supplement their lexical representations with knowledge of social group structure. We formalize this idea by extending a recent hierarchical Bayesian model of convention formation with an intermediate layer explicitly representing the latent communities each partner belongs to, and derive predictions about how conventions formed within a group ought to extend to new in-group and out-group members. We then present evidence from two behavioral experiments testing these predictions using a minimal group paradigm. Taken together, our findings provide a first step toward a formal framework for understanding the interplay between language use and social group knowledge.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages2232-2238
Number of pages7
StatePublished - 2021
Event43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021 - Virtual, Online, Austria
Duration: Jul 26 2021Jul 29 2021

Conference

Conference43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityVirtual, Online
Period7/26/217/29/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Keywords

  • communication
  • conventions
  • social cognition

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