Project OSF site: https://osf.io/7xsgr/
How can comments like “You’re actually good at math” be compliments to
some, but microaggressions to others? Differences across listeners likely
arise from variations in their underlying beliefs: when “actually” or “for
a woman” is regarded as unnecessary given the contextual assumptions, it
triggers the microaggression interpretation: the speaker did not treat the
information as expected. We predicted derivations of such interpretations
based on a)political party affiliation, b)beliefs about implicit sexism,
and c)subjective estimates of information amount carried by the adverbials.
These results present novel evidence that variations in listeners’
linguistic and non-linguistic beliefs combine to predict pragmatic
interpretations.