Dealing with Contradiction in a Communicative Context: A cross-cultural study

Communication provides an access to a huge amount of information. By communication one may largely surpass the knowledge individually acquired by benefiting from the knowledge acquired by others. However, communication entails a risk of manipulation. Our speaker may want us to act in such way that will satisfy his desires. In particular, he may voluntarily provide us with misleading information that will lead us to behave in way that will be beneficial to him. Dealing with communicated information involves thus the adaptive problem of dealing with a significant amount of false information. Evolutionary approaches to communication (Krebs and Dawkins, 1984; Sperber, 2001) suggest that we should be equipped with cognitive mechanisms designed to protect us against manipulation attempts. According to these approaches, one may expect that socially acquired knowledge will be granted with a smaller degree of credence than individually acquired knowledge especially if these two types of knowledge diverge. In other words, when an addressee receives a communicated piece of information that contradicts with her own beliefs, she is unlikely to take it into account to revise her initial set of beliefs.