Implicit dominance: Truthfulness of implicit information shapes commitment across meanings, but explicit truthfulness is limited to explicit meaning

Communication involves commitment to one’s words. These words often carry multiple layers of meaning. The explicit meaning may commit the speaker to one proposition, and the implicit to another. This raises the question: to which meaning are speakers seen as committed? This study examined whether listeners process commitment to utterances’ explicit and implicit meaning independently or integratively. Across three experiments, participants were presented with communicative scenarios and corresponding outcomes (each meaning’s truth-value). Participants’ perceived commitment to each meaning (explicit or implicit) was measured through a direct commitment probe, and overall trust. All three experiments demonstrated that the truth-value of the implicit content influenced perceived commitment not only to the implicit meaning, but also to the explicit, despite the latter being independently true/false. The effect was asymmetrical: the explicit truth-value influenced commitment almost exclusively to the explicit meaning. Thus, we observed an “implicit dominance” that was present despite variation in presentation and stimuli. Compared to direct commitment, trust was shaped by all truth-values, indicating that trust reflects a global evaluation of the speaker, while commitment is aligned with specific communicative intentions. These findings suggest that listeners integrate different meanings when evaluating a speaker’s commitment to their words.