Employing Games of Partial Information for Understanding Microaggressive Conflicts

Abstract

The term microaggression is used to describe everyday ambiguous slights or “put downs” that communicate discrimination toward a person belonging to a marginalized group. Longstanding critiques of the term have included unclear conceptual boundaries, forced casual linkages to mental health effects, and inadequate contextual criteria for identifying their occurrences. Recent research suggests that employing linguistic principles such as syntax, semantics, and pragmatics can help build an interactive examination for the study of conditions that influence a microaggressive encounter. Situated games of partial information are necessary for a computationally-tractable analysis of the textual, contextual, and interdependent features of ambiguous communicative exchanges. Thus, this chapter describes a microaggressive exchange between communicators by using situated games of partial information. Specifically, I detail a conversation excerpt where a microaggression emerged during a social interaction. I show how a communicator can interpret a message as discriminatory by examining the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors of the microaggression through games of partial information. This approach invites communicators to account for the many probabilistic conditions that inform a microaggressive exchange so that they can begin to repair discriminatory comments without defaulting to prescriptive responses that potentially escalate social hostility.