This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: People are often asked simple questions, such as the price of the cheapest flight to a particular destination. But the answers—and how they are perceived—can reveal far more than the cost of that trip itself.
For example, whether a person believes that the response "It's $200" means $200 or assumes that the figure has been rounded up or down depends on their perception of the person giving the answer. Such judgments can have broader implications: Previous research has found that people who speak with a high degree of precision—for example, by answering $203 rather than $200—are perceived as intelligent and hardworking but also pedantic and uptight. To better understand the role of social perception in language interpretation, linguistics professor Florian Schwarz and former postdoctoral researcher Andrea Beltrama of the School of Arts & Sciences asked how people would interpret the precision of a subset of speakers who are also perceived as intelligent but pedantic: those embodying a "nerdy" persona.
They created two cartoon characters—one wearing glasses and a sweater over a collared shirt, looking serious and assuming a guarded stance, and one wearing a T-shirt and jeans, smiling and assuming a relaxed posture—and confirmed that people perceived them as nerdy and "chill," respectively. Using the plane ticket question and other scenarios, Schwarz and Beltrama found that participants assessed the "nerdy" characters as more precise than "chill" ones in a 2024 study. These findings tie into research in social psychology that has shown how stereotypes—even with no other information present—can affect real-world judgments.
"That intrigued me, the idea that two people can say the same thing but it's interpreted differently based on the identity they're taking on," says Mikaela Belle Martin, a fourth-year linguistics doctoral student. Conducting research in the subfield of sociolinguistics, she is working toward a dissertation on the impact of race on how people understand the context of language beyond its literal meaning, which is known as pragmatic interpretation. "Maybe we have different linguistic expectations of speakers based on a bunch of their different social identities," Martin says.
She is specifically interested in asking what happens to expectations of precision when people see a character they perceive as both a nerd and Black. This is a relevant question because research has shown an association of nerdiness with whiteness. "But we know that Black nerds exist," Martin says, citing pop culture examples like Steve Urkel from "Family Matters" and Chidi Anagonye from "The Good Place." She and Beltrama, now an assistant professor at the University of Delaware, ran an experiment similar to Beltrama and Schwarz's study, except the 298 participants—89 of whom are Black—viewed scenarios specifically with Black characters.
They found that the nerdy and chill Black characters were both perceived as more precise than the white characters from the previous study and that there were no significant differences in expectations of precision between the nerdy and chill Black characters. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly. Martin and Beltrama have a few theories to explain this.
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