What can we conclude from speakers behaving badly?

In Gerrig, Ohaeri, and Brennan (this issue) we called into question whether "illusory transparency" (Keysar, 1994) is actually an interesting and perp lexing phenomenon, or whether readers are simply perplexed when protagonist s in stories behave uncooperatively or irrationally. In this commentary, we highlight data from our original experiments that were not addressed by Ke ysar (this issue). We suggest that serious demand characteristics, rather t han illusory transparency, explain participants' greatly varying judgments across experiments. We also reiterate our concern that, with respect to exp ectations of cooperative and rational behavior, the speakers in Keysar's sc enarios are behaving quite badly. It is questionable whether important theo retical generalizations can or should be drawn from this paradigm.