Prof. dr. Corien Bary and dr. Bob van Tiel are set to receive funding from NWO for their research on commitments in communication. NWO awards the funds from their Open Competition M programme in the social sciences and humanities domain. Researchers in that programme receive up to €400,000 for exploratory and curiosity-driven research.
What are Bary and Van Tiel trying to uncover?
By speaking we undertake commitments. But what exactly is the role of the hearer? Does their silence mean assent? And sometimes we want to ‘put something on the table’ without taking on a commitment, for example by saying that someone else said it. What does that mean for our commitments? We answer these questions by means of a new experimental method where we measure the activity of the frowning muscle, which is known to become active in the case of moral indignation. In this way, we will come to a better understanding of what happens when we communicate.
The project will be conducted in cooperation with Peter de Swart from the Centre for Language Studies at the Faculty of Arts.