Politeness in requests: A rejoinder to Kemper and Thissen

Abstract

Abstract:In our study "Polite responses to polite requests", 1 we reported four experiments. In Experiment 1, people rated the politeness of 18 types of indirect requests, such as Could you tell me where Jordan Hall is? In Experiments 2, 3, and 4, other people rated the politeness of various responses to these requests, such as Yes, I can-it's down the street and Down the street. From the findings, we argued two things. First, politeness is roughly accounted for by a cost-benefit theory of politeness. Second, understanding such requests appears to require understanding their direct as well as their indirect meanings. In their reply, Kemper and Thissen (1981) partially redid Experiment 1 and found certain apparent discrepancies. (They did not redo Experiments 2, 3, and 4, which were a major source of support for both of our conclusions.) From these discrepancies, they concluded, "A cost benefit analysis cannot, in general, account for politeness of a wide range of requests". They did not address our second conclusion.We suggest that Kemper and Thissen's conclusions are premature. The discrepancies they found are not replicated in six other investigations. When we tested their explanation for the discrepancies, it was decisively disconfirmed. More generally, the independent evidence for the cost-benefit theory of politeness is so extensive-quite apart from our own experiments-that Kemper and Thissen would need more than a partial failure to overturn it. Article:Kemper and Thissen's apparent discrepancies When we first examined Kemper and Thissen's data, their discrepant findings didn't seem to make sense. So we redid their experiment. In our original experiment, we had asked 30 people each to rate 54 requests, three each of 18 types; the 54 requests each asked for a different piece of information. Kemper and Thissen had asked 20 people to rate only one instance each of the 18 types of requests, and all 18 requests were for the same piece of formation. Did this change in procedure matter? To find out, we had 36 Stanford University students each rank order 18 requests, one of each type, for politeness; all 18 requests asked for the location of nearby Candlestick Park. The students judged how polite the request would be if they were asked it by another student with whom they were acquainted but not close friends.The results of this experiment do not favor Kemper and Thissen. The 18 mean ranks were, first of all, highly reliable, with a coefficient of reliability of 0.99. These mean ranks correlated 0.88 with our original ratings, but only 0.69 with Kemper and Thissen's (which themselves correlated only 0.40 with our original ratings). The difference between 0.88 and 0.69 is significant, t(15)= 2.19, < 0.05.Previously published data do not favor Kemper and Thissen either. Mohan (1974) asked 80 people to judge the politeness of 27 requests (all requesting the same action). Seven of Mohan's request types were among Kemper and Thissen's selection, and five were among ours. Mohan's ratings correlated 0.83 with our origina...

A cross‐cultural comparison of implicit theories of requesting

“…These three strategies seem to vary along several contextual features, including illocutionary transparency or opacity (Searle, 1975), syntactic directness (Becker, Kimmel, & Bevill, 1989), politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1978), imperative force or coerciveness (Jordan & Roloff, 1990), syntactic features (Carrell & Konneker, 1981), and cost and benefit to the interlocutor (Clark & Schunk, 1981 ). Knowledge about how request strategies vary is likely to be incorporated in people's implicit theories of requesting.…”