Sarcasm Detection and Cultural Hegemony
Amazon customer service language · 6 comments · 450 words
Way back in the 1990s, my family visited the USA. It seemed at every single large shop there was a person stood inside whose sole job was to say "Welcome to STORENAME! How are you doing today? We're so pleased to have you shop with us!" - their face plastered with an enormous grin.
It was quite the culture shock.
To us, it felt weird, insincere, and creepy. But, like the over-enthusiastic whooping and cheering from US sitcom audiences, it seemed to be an accepted part of the culture.
A few years later, the Disney Store in the UK decided that they needed to import this style of greater. I remember walking into a store and seeing a clearly mortified teenager reciting the same spiel as in the American stores.
It was not a success. British culture doesn't really do over-the-top, flowery, purple-prose. It reads to us as sarcasm. I'm not saying this is an attractive characteristic of the average Britisher - but it is noticeable. It causes great cognitive dissonance when American friends and colleagues give us praise - surely they are being insincere? But, no, everything is awesome to them.
With the rise of International English, most countries' linguistic foibles get absorbed into the zeitgeist. We do the needful once we have circled back and then get into a muddle over what the verb "to table" means. Mostly, it works. Mostly.
Recently, I had a chat with an Amazon UK customer service assistant. I assume that they weren't in the UK and were outsourced to a country where the weather is hotter and the standard of written English is good enough. They were incredibly helpful so I finished my conversation with a well-intentioned "have a lovely day".
In return, I got this:
Wow! My initial thought was that they were being heavily sarcastic. If someone in a UK shop had said that to me in person, I'd assume they wanted to step outside for a punch-up. Seriously, that's fighting words over here! And the implied threat to my family...?
Of course, it is none of that. They probably have a list of canned responses which they can pre-select. Responses which have been extensively focus-grouped and found to be awesome. Or maybe I wasn't talking to a human - perhaps a bot just decided to repay my compliment as though I were an American.
Anyway, if you're doing prompt-engineering on an LLM please be sure to set the sarcasm detection to the lowest common denominator!
@Edent Nice reminder that sarcasm is not universal. Thanks !
/me trying not too sound sarcastic. Damn, sarcasm is hard …
John says:
My take on this is that many of the "chat" applications have automate responses inserted in them from a set script. So at the ending a conversation the aid would press a set key code and the script would run with a predefine ( and approved ) script message.
@Edent I don't often say this but: "Maybe the Tories are right". The UK does need it's own AI industry 🙂
@Edent I'm American and it reads very insincere to me. The Walmart greeters are horrible too. I came here to buy stuff and then leave, don't ambush me with social interaction.
Joker_vD says:
I blame it (and the Americans' preoccupation with insincere smiling in general) on Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People". I know, I know, one man single-handedly changing a huge part of nation's culture? But Carnegie himself notes in the book that the reason the smile works is that sellers don't, as a rule, smile at the would-be buyers during the transaction — so that smile must have not been part of the culture yet. And we all know what happened then: the book becomes a bestseller, everybody reads it, it's taught in MBA courses, etc. and voila, now everybody's smiling. You can even see it in, e.g., the photos of politicians/businessmen: in the 30–40s you see mostly serious, somber-looking men. By the 70–80s almost all of them have that rigor mortis smile.
I believe the Wal-Mart greeter programme was started as a way to provide gainful employment for seniors (although, as with all things Wal-Mart, extreme skepticism is warranted as to their true intentions). For an alternative explanation, see the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart_greeter
Many of the differences between British high-context, implicit culture and American low-context explicit culture stem from the latter's need to integrate vast numbers of immigrants, many of whom did not speak English as a first language.
Darwin originated something known as the Facial Feedback Hypothesis, that forcing yourself to smile actually improves your mood, and there is some experimental evidence supporting the theory. If the British smiled more as the Americans do, perhaps they would be less happier and have a sunnier outlook on life, miserable weather notwithstanding.
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