People tend to interpret the exact same statement differently depending on the political identity of the speaker and their own personal beliefs. A new study published in the journal Open Mind provides evidence that listeners are more likely to pick up on the implied meanings of sentences when they share the political affiliation of the politician speaking. This suggests that the trust we place in a speaker plays a major role in how we decipher indirect communication in everyday life.
Every day, people use language to hint at things without explicitly saying them. For example, if someone says they ate “some” of the cookies, listeners naturally assume they mean “some, but not all” of the cookies. In the field of linguistics, this type of implied meaning is known as a scalar implicature. A scalar implicature happens when a speaker uses a mathematically or logically weaker word, leading the listener to assume the speaker did not mean a stronger word.
Traditional theories of language assume that human communication relies on a basic foundation of cooperation. These frameworks propose that speakers and listeners work together toward a shared goal of mutual understanding. Because of this assumed cooperation, a listener expects the speaker to be as informative and truthful as possible.
In real life, people do not always cooperate. Sometimes individuals use indirect language to manage social conflicts, hide their true intentions, or even deceive others. Evolutionary psychologists and linguists suggest that humans use indirect language to leave themselves a loophole. By implying something rather than stating it outright, a speaker can plausibly deny the hidden meaning if they are ever challenged.
Nicole Gotzner, a researcher at the Cognitive Science Institute at Osnabrück University in Germany, wanted to understand how people navigate this type of ambiguous communication. She aimed to find out if listeners adjust their expectations of cooperation based on who is speaking. Specifically, she wanted to see if political affiliation influences how willing people are to read between the lines.
“I got interested in political language because it diverges from the norms that we usually follow in conversation,” Gotzner said. “For example, in ordinary conversation we often work towards a joint goal and choose words that make our intentions clear, that is we cooperate. But political language is non-cooperative: politicians use strategic messages to win over their voters.”
Gotzner noted that political speech involves a unique social dynamic where individuals negotiate their social identities. The specific phrasing a politician selects can be used strategically to satisfy multiple audiences at once. “The right phrase, carefully vague, can energize followers while denying any blame,” Gotzner explained. “We hear so often from a politician ‘I never said that’ or ‘this is not what I meant.’”
“I also wanted to understand why people misunderstand each other once they start talking about politics,” Gotzner continued. “Intuitively, there is a lot of cross-talk when people who have different political convictions debate, already at the basic level of language understanding.”
She recognized that personal values play a substantial role in this communication breakdown. “It turns out that this has to do with our social identities and cognitive biases,” she noted. “We use language to signal group membership (and are biased to adopt the majority opinion of our group) and therefore we sometimes jump too quickly to a conclusion, also regarding what someone wanted to communicate in the first place.”
To test these ideas, Gotzner focused her research on the communication styles of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. She recruited 120 participants from the United States through an online research platform called Prolific. The participants were pre-screened to ensure they were native English speakers and current residents of the United States.
The study took place on November 1, 2024, just days before the United States presidential election. The sample consisted of 61 individuals who self-identified as Democratic voters and 59 individuals who self-identified as Republican voters. The Democratic group included 45 women and 16 men, with an average age of about 38. The Republican group included 36 women and 26 men, with an average age of about 40.
The procedure involved asking these participants to read a series of 70 short written statements. Each statement contained a weak adjective, such as the word “likely” or “attractive.” The participants were told that the statements were uttered by either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.
After reading each statement, the participants had to make a judgment about the speaker’s intended meaning. They were asked if the speaker intended to imply the negative version of a stronger related word. To do this, the survey presented the weaker word and asked if it meant the speaker was intentionally excluding the stronger word.
For example, if the statement quoted the politician describing an event as “likely,” the participant had to decide if the politician actually meant “likely, but not certain.” Similarly, if the politician described a situation as “attractive,” the participant judged whether the speaker specifically meant “attractive, but not stunning.”
The findings showed that belief alignment between the listener and the speaker significantly influenced the interpretation of the statements. Democratic voters were more likely to recognize the implied meanings when they believed the statements came from Kamala Harris. In practice, a Democrat reading a quote from Harris would be more prone to assume she specifically meant “likely, but not certain” rather than leaving the meaning open-ended.
In the same way, Republican voters were more likely to derive the implied meanings when they believed the statements came from Donald Trump. A Republican reading a quote from Trump using a word like “big” would be more inclined to assume he specifically meant “big, but not gigantic.” They trusted their preferred candidate enough to read into the unsaid boundaries of the words.
Interestingly, there was no overall difference between the two groups of voters in their general ability or willingness to understand these statements. There was also no overall difference in how the statements of the two candidates were interpreted in a broad sense. The deciding factor was the interaction between the voter’s specific political affiliation and the specific identity of the speaker.
This finding suggests that people are more willing to fill in the communicative gaps when they belong to the same social group as the speaker. When a listener shares a political identity with a politician, they seem to grant that speaker a tentative stance of trust. This trust encourages the listener to assume the speaker is being cooperative, which leads to a higher rate of deriving the unstated, implied meaning.
The author also compared these results to a previous baseline study. In that older study, the exact same statements were attributed to fictional everyday people with common names like John or Mary. The comparison revealed that participants in the current study were actually more likely to derive implied meanings for both political candidates than they were for the everyday fictional names.
This baseline comparison suggests that listeners might pay special attention to the implied meanings of famous politicians due to their positions of power. Even when the participants were evaluating the opposing candidate, they recognized the implied meanings more often than they did for average, non-political speakers. People seem to understand what a politician is implying, even if they do not necessarily agree with the statement or support the speaker.
The researchers also looked at how specific word choices affected the interpretations across the groups. Some language scales are considered bounded, meaning they have a strict endpoint, like the word “certain.” Other adjectives are extreme but lack a strict endpoint, such as the word “gigantic.” Previous research indicates that people usually derive implied meanings more easily for bounded words than for extreme, unbounded words.
In this study, the semantic features of the words affected the two voter groups differently. Republican voters showed a lower sensitivity to these specific word properties compared to Democratic voters. This was especially true when Republican voters were evaluating statements attributed to Kamala Harris.
This lowered sensitivity might stem from well-known biases regarding how people process information from individuals outside their social group. Listeners sometimes evaluate the content of a message less deliberately when it comes from an opposing political figure. Despite this difference, the overall results demonstrate that people do process the basic meaning of expressions and do not simply endorse anything a political leader says blindly.
These dynamics reveal how political discourse operates on multiple psychological levels. “People aren’t just disagreeing about politics, they’re often not even hearing the same message in the first place,” Gotzner told PsyPost. “Our political identities can shape what we think was communicated, even when the words are the same.”
This early divergence in comprehension helps explain wider societal divides. “Hence, polarization of opinions can begin at the basic level of language understanding, before we debate facts,” Gotzner noted. “In an age of mass information and AI, we must be vigilant and decide carefully who is truly cooperative. We need to be wary not just of the politician’s words, but of our own impulse to interpret their sentences in a way that matches our biases.”
While the study provides robust evidence for the role of social identity in language processing, there are potential limitations to consider. The study relies on participants reading written statements and making a delayed judgment about the meaning. It remains an open question exactly when this bias occurs in the brain’s processing timeline during live reading or listening.
“I haven’t tested whether these effects occur during online language processing,” Gotzner noted, referring to how people comprehend language word by word in real time. “But we did so in a recent preprint, which is currently under review.”
In that upcoming paper, the research team investigates these rapid cognitive processes. Future research could explore these different stages of mental processing in even more detail. Scientists might use real-time brain imaging techniques to see exactly when belief alignment alters comprehension.
Looking ahead, Gotzner hopes to build a broader theoretical framework for how people interpret meaning in social contexts. “I am developing a dual route pragmatics model to account for this,” she explained. “This model assumes that much of communication is automatic, heuristics-based.”
This new model would help explain why misunderstandings occur even outside the political realm. “This accounts for miscommunication, especially when trust is high, we are socially close to someone and we are cognitively or emotionally overwhelmed,” Gotzner said.
The study, “Does It Matter What Is Said and Who Said It? The Interpretation of Trump’s and Harris’ Statements Among Republican and Democrat Voters“, was authored by Nicole Gotzner.
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