Assignment Three

Hello Professor Hancock and 4500 students! Welcome to the blog of Team 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team. In class last week, our team took an important pledge. As we held our right hand on Clark’s Using Language and our left hand in the air, each of us solemnly swore to “ pull my own weight, to work hard for the benefit of the group, to contact any and all group members should I be unable to complete a task given to me, and to always go for the gold (defined as working to the best of our abilities whenever our abilities allow).”

While meeting to discuss the readings, multiple members of our group expressed interest in the politeness section at the end of chapter 12. In a face-to-face conversation prompting a joint commitment to a task, Clark found that (1) the less threatening the joint task person A proposes, the more polite person A is judged to be by person B; if the task is accepted (2) the less threatening the response is to person B’s self-worth, the more polite person A is judged by person B; and finally if the task is declined, (3) the more legitimately person B accounts for declining the task, the more polite person B is judged by person A. In other words, Clark declares that the politeness of an inquiry (using words like “please”) will indicate how polite the response will be (using words like “certainly I can help” or “I’m sorry I can’t). Our team thought it might be interesting to research whether or not Clark’s hypotheses of politeness holds equally true in a computer mediated setting where providing information with the greatest concision and economy is placed at a premium. Based on Susan Herring’s article on Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis, we understood that a good research question is both open-ended and motivated by a hypothesis. Therefore, we present the following experimental design based on the idea that politeness in the CMC setting will be based on speed and accuracy of response rather than a reflection of self worth.

To test the hypothesis we have designed an experiment in which a subject will be asked to find out the time, place, and location of a concert at Cornell University. The events information will not be posted online, and the subject will be told that the only way to receive the information is by texting the event coordinator whose phone number is provided. The events coordinator will, of course, be a confederate, who is either told to answer the subjects questions with responses that project an equal equity (“yes of course I can provide you with the time, it’s at 6:00”), or alternatively, with responses that are short and simply answer the question with no additional fluff (“it’s at 6:00”). Additionally, the confederate will either answer quickly (within 60 seconds) or delayed (~3 minutes).

After the subject has engaged in text-conversation with the confederate, they will be given a survey asking a number of questions, with the goal in mind of analyzing how polite they deemed to confederate to be throughout the conversation. Based on our hypothesis, we assume that the fast response condition will be rated more polite than the delayed response condition, even though none of the polite jargon that Clark describes had been used.

While this experimental design is rather simple, we needed to make sure the data we collected was “not trivial” as Herring dictates. Therefore, looking at our design in a macro sense, this experiment will help us understand how individuals gauge politeness online; a venue where more and more important business transactions are taking place. By understanding how people evaluate politeness online (for example valuing quick responses over more elaborate, but delayed responses) we can understand how to best economize our language use online for the most efficient and mutually agreeable computer mediated experience.