The Role of Entitlement in Formatting Preferences Across Requesters and Recipients

ABSTRACT

Requesting plays a key role in human communication. One can request the same thing in multiple ways (e.g., “Pass the salt” vs. “Could you pass the salt?”). How do speakers determine which request form to produce? And how does this choice affect a recipient’s evaluation of a request? Previous analyses of naturalistic conversations suggest that a speaker’s entitlement – their expectations that the recipient of a request is able and willing to fulfill it – can influence their formatting decisions. However, the role of entitlement in format selection has not been tested experimentally, nor is it known how a requester’s entitlement impacts a recipient’s evaluation of a request form. Across several online experiments, we asked whether manipulations of a speaker’s entitlement influenced formatting preferences across requesters and recipients. While requesters robustly recognized normative mappings between entitlement and request formatting (Experiment 2), they did not necessarily follow these mappings unprompted (Experiments 1–1b); instead, they tended to produce modal interrogative requests (“Can you do X?”), regardless of entitlement. Recipients, however, systematically modulated their preferences for particular forms as a function of a requester’s entitlement (Experiment 3). We also conducted exploratory analyses on the data from each experiment using human-normed judgments about entitlement and other social-interactional variables (e.g., degree of imposition); critically, for both Experiments 2 and 3, judgments about a requester’s entitlement explained variance in participants’ responses above and beyond other variables.

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Note that while some (Ervin-Tripp, 1976) use the term “directive” broadly (e.g., to refer to any utterance enlisting the services of another), we use it synonymously with the term direct requests.

2. Note that this definition does not distinguish between positive (“Could you … ?”) and negative (“Couldn’t you … ”) interrogative constructions, although others (Heinemann, 2006) have argued that these contrastive forms may convey different degrees of entitlement.