“Oh!” Reasoning about underlying expectations

Imagine a young boy expressing a gender counter-stereotypical preference (e.g., wanting to buy a Barbie doll) and his caregiver provides a permissive, gender egalitarian response. However, imagine that response comes slowly, with markers of surprise and production difficulty (e.g., “Oh! Um. . . Sure”). What message does that young boy really receive?

While people may be reluctant to explicitly state social stereotypes, their underlying beliefs nevertheless emerge through subtler conversational cues, such as surprisal reactions that reveal expectations. In this line of work, I investigate how messages that are explicitly permissive and outwardly egalitarian (e.g., “Sure, you can have that one”) might nevertheless be interpreted very differently based on presence of surprisal cues like interjections (“oh!”) and disfluencies (“um”). This work provides emerging evidence that conversational feedback may play a critical and underappreciated role in the transmission of social beliefs.