The logic of indirect speech

By Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, James J. Lee. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008

347 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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Cooperate without looking: Why we care what people think and not just what they do (2015, background): “In experiments, subjects (i) do not cooperate more with friends who have just given them a gift but do cooperate more with strangers who have just given them the same gift (40), (ii) take greater care to highlight contributions to strangers than to friends (41), (iii) are offended when close friends”
Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange (2014, background): “2 Alternatively, taboo suggestions can be shrouded in indirect speech, allowing enough ambiguity to maintain plausible deniability (Pinker et al. 2008).”
Coevolution of Composite‐Tool Technology, Constructive Memory, and Language (2010, background): “The Language of Diplomacy, Flattery, Friendship, and Love Grammatical innovations for indirect speech (Pinker, Nowak, and Lee 2008), which I prefer to call the language of diplomacy, may have facilitated the mutual trust required to maintain reciprocal cooperation.”
How to do things with slurs: Studies in the way of derogatory words (2013, background): “In ‘‘The Logic of Indirect Speech,’’ Pinker et al. (2008) suggest that the ‘‘literal form of a sentence is consistent with the safest relationship between speaker and hearer’’ (p. 835), and here I am similarly suggesting that lexical items of a neutral kind (e.g., descriptive terms) are usually…”