# Minding the Politeness Gap in Cross-cultural Communication

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15623 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15623/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [The CMA Evolution Strategy: A Tutorial](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00772/) (2016)
- [Value Profiles for Encoding Human Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15484/) (2025)
- [Communicate to Play: Pragmatic Reasoning for Efficient Cross-Cultural Communication in Codenames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04900/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Circadian Modulation of Semantic Exploration in Social Media Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15091/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication often arise from subtle differences in interpretation, but it is unclear whether these differences arise from the literal meanings assigned to words or from more general pragmatic factors such as norms around politeness and brevity. In this paper, we report three experiments examining how speakers of British and American English interpret intensifiers like "quite" and "very." To better understand these cross-cultural differences, we developed a computational cognitive model where listeners recursively reason about speakers who balance informativity, politeness, and utterance cost. Our model comparisons suggested that cross-cultural differences in intensifier interpretation stem from a combination of (1) different literal meanings, (2) different weights on utterance cost. These findings challenge accounts based purely on semantic variation or politeness norms, demonstrating that cross-cultural differences in interpretation emerge from an intricate interplay between the two.