ABSTRACT
Language, culture and behavior come together in ways in which directives are issued, interpreted and acted on. We have been working with a functional and culturally universal theory of perceived politeness derived from Brown and Levinson (1987). We have extended this theory toward a cognitive model of politeness effects on human decision making behaviors and attitudes. We describe these theories and then report an experiment we have conducted in which multi-cultural participants are given directives with varying politeness content in a testbed context which allows us to control for relevant parameters from the models including power and social distance of the directive giver and imposition of the directive. Results clearly show significant impacts of politeness on a variety of directive compliance behaviors. Our model proved accurate for predicting the relationship of social distance, politeness and directive compliance, but less so for power relationships.
