Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2002 May;13(3):207-12.
doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00439.

Speakers' overestimation of their effectiveness

Affiliations

Speakers' overestimation of their effectiveness

Boaz Keysar et al. Psychol Sci. 2002 May.

Abstract

Successful communication depends in part on an ability to anticipate miscommunication. We investigated speakers' ability to gauge their addressees' understanding. Participants in our experiments were asked to say ambiguous sentences while attempting to convey a specific intention to their addressee. When they estimated the addressee's understanding of the intended meaning, they showed a consistent tendency to overestimate their effectiveness. They expected the addressee to understand more often than the addressee actually did. In contrast, overhearers who were informed about the speakers intention did not systematically overestimate the speakers' effectiveness. Our findings suggest that when speakers monitor their own utterances, they do not act as unbiased observers. Instead, they underestimate the ambiguity of their own utterances and overestimate the extent to which their disambiguating cues make their intention transparent. Such overestimation could be a systematic source of miscommunication in natural conversation, and should be accounted for by any theory of language production.

PubMed Disclaimer

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources