Take my word for it: Holistic integration of explicit and implicit contents in processing commitment and trust

Communication is a process of commitment to one’s words. However, these words often carry multiple layers of meaning. For instance, the explicit meaning may involve commitment to one proposition, while the implicit meaning may suggest a different commitment. This raises the question: to which meaning are speakers seen as committed? This study examined whether listeners process commitment to an utterance’s explicit and implicit meanings independently or in an integrative manner. Across two experiments, participants were presented with everyday communicative scenarios with their corresponding real-world outcomes (i.e., every meaning’s truth-value). Participants’ perceived commitment to each stream of meaning (explicit or implicit) was measured through a direct commitment probe, along with their overall trust in the speaker. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the truth-value of the implicit content influenced participants’ perceived commitment not only to the implicit meaning, but also to the explicit meaning, despite the latter being independently true/false. The effect was asymmetrical, as the truth-value of the explicit content influenced commitment to the explicit meaning only. Experiment 2 examined this asymmetry by manipulating the subjectivity of the explicit content, which resulted in a moderate shift towards symmetry when the explicit content was objective. Compared to direct commitment, trust in the speaker was broadly shaped by the truth-value of both explicit and implicit content, indicating that trust reflects a more global evaluation of the speaker, while commitment is more tightly aligned with specific communicative intentions. Together, these findings suggest that listeners integrate different meanings when evaluating a speaker’s commitment to their words.