The primary aim of this paper is to identify cross-cultural similarities and differences in people's implicit theories of requesting. Implicit theories are conceptualized as containing information about five interactive constraints that influence choices about requests: (1) Clarity, (2) Perceived imposition, (3) Consideration for the other's feelings, (4) Risking disapproval for self, and (5) Effectiveness. The paper compares how these five constraints are perceived and rated across cultures and traces possible links between the constraints and perceptions of the likelihood of using various request strategies. Participants are a total of 595 undergraduates: 296 Koreans (native speakers of Korean) and 299 Americans (native American English speakers) studying in their respective countries. After reading a hypothetical request situation, participants evaluated request strategies along the five constraint dimensions as well as for likelihood of use. The rank-ordering of the request strategies along the dimensions were similar across cultures except for effectiveness of strategies. Striking cross-cultural differences were found in the rank and mean strategy ratings for effectiveness judgments: U.S. participants considered the direct statement strategy as the most effective way of making a request, while Korean participants rated it as the least effective strategy. Regarding the incompatibility among interactive constraints, U.S. participants saw clarity to be closely related to effectiveness of strategies; for Korean participants clarity of strategies was counterproductive to effectiveness. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

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People's values provide a decision-making framework that helps guide their everyday actions. Most popular methods of assessing values show tenuous relationships with everyday behaviors. Using a new Amazon Mechanical Turk dataset (N = 767) consisting of people's language, values, and behaviors, we explore the degree to which attaining "ground truth" is possible with regards to such complicated mental phenomena. We then apply our findings to a corpus of Facebook user (N=130,828) status updates in order to understand how core values influence the personal thoughts and behaviors that users share through social media. Our findings suggest that self-report questionnaires for abstract and complex phenomena, such as values, are inadequate for painting an accurate picture of individual mental life. Free response language data and language modeling show greater promise for understanding both the structure and content of concepts such as values and, additionally, exhibit a predictive edge over self-report questionnaires.

SemEval 2021 Task 7, HaHackathon, was the first shared task to combine the previously separate domains of humor detection and offense detection. We collected 10,000 texts from Twitter and the Kaggle Short Jokes dataset, and had each annotated for humor and offense by 20 annotators aged 18-70. Our subtasks were binary humor detection, prediction of humor and offense ratings, and a novel controversy task: to predict if the variance in the humor ratings was higher than a specific threshold. The subtasks attracted 36-58 submissions, with most of the participants choosing to use pre-trained language models. Many of the highest performing teams also implemented additional optimization techniques, including task-adaptive training and adversarial training. The results suggest that the participating systems are well suited to humor detection, but that humor controversy is a more challenging task. We discuss which models excel in this task, which auxiliary techniques boost their performance, and analyze the errors which were not captured by the best systems.

This study explores culture's effect on behaviors and outcomes in intercultural negotiation and examines how those effects are moderated by role. Eighty U.S. and international students took part in a previously developed negotiation task (Pruitt, 1981) and completed Hui and Triandis's (1986) individualism-collectivism (INDCOL) scale. Negotiation interactions were coded for information sharing, offers, and distributive tactics. Findings show that a negotiation dyad's collectivism is positively associated with higher joint profit. The effects of culture on both communication behaviors and joint outcomes, however, differ by role of the negotiator. In particular, seller collectivism has larger and more consistent effects on communication behavior and joint profit than buyer collectivism. Results support a "culture in context" perspective of negotiation that takes into account negotiator qualities, contextual and structural features of the negotiation, and mediating processes in addition to cultural values.