That's Not What I Meant: Assessing Individual Differences in the Perception of Indirect Meaning

The present research developed and evaluated a behavioral measure designed to assess variability in the perception of indirect meaning across multiple pragmatic forms. Three studies were conducted with convenience samples of participants ( N = 453) recruited from either Prolific ( M age = 36.03) or undergraduate research pools ( M age = 18.74). Participants either read or listened to a conversation in English containing 21 utterances instantiating seven types of indirect meaning (e.g., indirect requests, sarcasm, scalar implicatures) and judged the likelihood of indirect interpretations of each. The resulting composite measure demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and person-level reliability when evaluated using variance-partitioning mixed-effects models. Individual differences in indirectness perception were positively associated with multiple indicators of emotional intelligence, including empathy, emotion recognition, and theory of mind, and showed a small but reliable relationship with political ideology. These findings suggest that sensitivity to indirect meaning is a stable individual difference, closely related to social–emotional understanding, and best conceptualized as a composite index of pragmatic inferencing across contexts rather than a unitary latent trait.