Social Behaviour in Police Interviews: Relating Data to Theories - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 318

16.3.1.2 Systems Using This Concept

There have been a few attempts to create virtual agents that act according to the
interpersonal circumplex theory. One of these is the serious game deLearyous,
which focuses on training interpersonal communication skills in a working envi-
ronment setting, letting users interact with virtual agents through written natural
language input (Vaassen and Wauters 2012 ). However, one of the findings of this
project was that determining the stance of dialogue utterances is a very difficult task,
even for human annotators. Other work has focused on finding correspondences of
non-verbal behaviour with stances (Ravenet et al. 2013 ). This approach focusses on
the generation of upper body movement and of facial animation on a virtual agent,
based on human annotation of behaviours.

16.3.2 Face Threats and Politeness

Informed by Goffman's notion of face (Goffman 1959 )—a person's public self-
image—Brown and Levinson (hereafter, B&L) constructed their theory about
politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson 1987 ). Suspect factors 1, 3 and 10 were
interpreted as related to face (and politeness), see Table 16.2 . The police factors
were not interpreted as having a relation with face. 5
B&L distinguish between negative and positive face, which denote a person's
need for freedom ( autonomy ) and a person's need to be approved of and approving
of others ( approval ), respectively. Their approach to politeness revolves around the
concept of face-threatening acts (FTAs) which are inherent with actions taken by a
speaker, as these actions potentially impose on a hearer's face by threatening their
needs. B&L view politeness strategies as ways to redress these FTAs in order to
minimise their imposition. The four main politeness strategy types follow below,
ordered from least to most polite.

Bald on-record Being straight to the point, e.g., “Tell me where you were that

night.”
Positive politeness Taking the other's wants into account, e.g., “Would you like
to tell me where you were that night?”
Negative politeness Not hindering the other's autonomy, e.g., “If it's not incon-
venient to you, could you tell me where you were that night?”
Off record Being indirect or vague about one's own wants, e.g., “I don't seem to
have written down where you were that night.”

Conflict situations often arise in the police domain where people may not have
the intention to stay polite—on the contrary, they may have the intention to be

5 Police factor 4 was considered by some interpreters to have a relation with face but this was not
unanimous.