"Someone told me": Preemptive reputation protection in communication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Information sharing can be regarded as a form of cooperative behavior protected by the work of a reputation system. Yet, deception in communication is common. The research examined the possibility that speakers use epistemic markers to preempt being seen as uncooperative even though they in fact are. Epistemic markers convey the speakers' certainty and involvement in the acquisition of the information. When speakers present a lie as indirectly acquired or uncertain, they gain if the lie is believed and likely do not suffer if it is discovered. In our study, speakers of English and Italian (where epistemic markers were presented lexically) and of Estonian and Turkish (where they were presented grammatically through evidentials) had to imagine being a speaker in a conversation and choose a response to a question. The response options varied 1) the truth of the part of the response addressing the question at issue and 2) whether the epistemic marker indicated that the speaker had acquired the information directly or indirectly. Across languages, if participants chose to tell a lie, they were likely to present it with an indirect epistemic marker, thus providing evidence for preemptive action accompanying uncooperative behavior. For English and Italian participants, this preemptive action depended respectively on resource availability and relationship with the addressee, suggesting cultural variability in the circumstances that trigger it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".