Beliefs About a Speaker Affect Feeling of Another's Knowing

Beliefs About a Speaker Affect Feeling of Another's Knowing Lisette Mol (l.mol@tilburguniversity.edu) 1 Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC), School of Humanities, Tilburg University P.O. Box 90135, NL-5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands Anna K. Kuhlen (anna.kuhlen@bccn-berlin.de) 2, 3, 4 Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charite – Universitatsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany Berlin Center of Advanced Neuroimaging, Charite – Universitatsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany Ruben van der Steen (r.p.vdrsteen@tilburguniversity.edu) 1 Mike Obbens (m.p.obbens@tilburguniversity.edu) 1 Abstract People's estimations of how certain speakers are of their knowledge (FOAK) match speakers' own estimation (FOK) of how certain they are (Brennan & Williams, 1995). This is because others can interpret the verbal and nonverbal cues of (un)certainty that a speaker displays (Brennan & Williams, 1995; Swerts & Krahmer, 2005). Estimating another's certainty thus seems to be driven by the bottom-up processing of speaker-displayed cues. In this paper, we explore the top- down influence of beliefs about a speaker on judgments of a speaker's certainty. In a perception study, we varied whether a speaker's proclaimed profession would make him an expert or a novice on the topic he was questioned on. Such beliefs were shown to influence participants' ratings of the speaker's certainty, in addition to speaker-displayed cues. Thus, next to the bottom-up processing of speaker-displayed cues, the top- down processing of beliefs about a speaker influences judgments of others' certainty. Keywords: FOK, FOAK, top-down processing, bottom-up processing, speaker-displayed cues, person perception. Introduction When watching the news on television or online, we often are informed by so-called 'experts' on the current topic, for example, an economist may comment on the Euro crisis and an architect may be interviewed on the progress of a construction site. Often, the person's expertise is displayed in a header once their contribution starts, or announced upfront by the newsreader conducting the interview. Does such knowledge of people's expertise affect our judgment of their certainty? And if so, does this effect depend on whether the expert displays certain or uncertain behavior? This study assesses the influence of knowing another person’s expertise, on the judgment of their certainty when answering questions. We thereby test the influence of this factor relative to the verbal and nonverbal cues of uncertainty displayed by the person answering the questions (henceforth referred to as the 'respondent'). In the following, we first provide an introduction on the production and perception of cues of (un)certainty. Then we discuss the different types of processing involved in utilizing speaker- displayed cues, and in making use of beliefs about the speaker. This leads to our research question and hypotheses. Displaying (Un)certainty Sometimes, when unable to remember the answer to a particular question, we have a strong intuition that we do know the answer, despite our momentary inability to retrieve it from memory. This meta-cognitive phenomenon is known as feeling-of-knowing (FOK), (Hart, 1965). Participants' FOK has been shown to be a reliable predictor of whether they can later recognize the sought-after answer in a multiple-choice test (Blake, 1973; Hart, 1965). This shows that people's intuition on whether particular knowledge is stored in their memory or is absent from it, tends to be correct. When sharing our knowledge with others, we tend to share our intuition on the certainty of this knowledge as well, by displaying auditory and visual cues of (un)certainty (Brennan & Williams, 1995; Goffman, 1967, 1971, 1978; Smith & Clark, 1993; Swerts & Krahmer, 2005). This may be done to save face in case of being incorrect, or to be as informative as needed, in accordance with Grice's maxim of quantity (Grice, 1989). FOK-ratings can be obtained by asking respondents how certain they are of their answer to particular knowledge questions (Hart, 1965). By matching such ratings to the auditory and visual behavior respondents exhibit while answering, characteristic cues of displays of (un)certainty have been identified. Auditory cues of uncertainty were shown to include: rising intonation, an initial pause, the use of fillers ( um , uh ), hedging ( I think , Most likely ), and self-talk ( Let's see, what was that again... ), (Goffman, 1978; Smith & Clark, 1993). Certainty, on the other hand, is displayed auditorily by the absence of such cues, and a falling intonation. Visually, uncertainty can be displayed by rising the eyebrows, smiling (when recognizing the answer should be known), producing a marked facial expression (a 'funny- face'), and diverted gaze (Swerts & Krahmer, 2005).