Cognitive representations of request situations: The relative importance of goal specificity and situation features

According to cognitive models, the design of a request is guided by situation‐action rules that connect types of request situations to linguistic cues. The situation component of such rules contains a goal‐feature combination specifying a request goal and situation features. Two studies investigated the relative importance of goal specificity and features in judgments of the extent to which goal‐feature combinations matched a target scenario. Preferred levels of goal specificity were a borrow goal or gain assistance goal (Study 1) and a stop noise goal or stop annoyance goal (Study 2). Perceived similarity to target scenarios did not differ between (a) goal‐feature combinations that contained a more specific goal (e.g., borrow) but failed to match the target on one situation feature and (b) goal‐feature combinations that contained a more general goal (e.g., gain assistance) but matched the target on all three features. Implications for rule retrieval and communication failure are considered.