Anticipated Ongoing Interaction Versus Channel Effects on Relational Communication in Computer-Mediated Interaction

Previous research on the interpersonal tone of computer-mediated communication shows different effects using longitudinal computer-mediated groups than are found in research using one-shot groups, even before the developmental aspects associated with time can accrue. One factor distinguishing these approaches is the anticipation of future interaction experienced by longitudinal groups. This research reports an experiment assessing the relative effects of anticipated future interaction and different communication media (computer-mediated versus face-to-face communication) on the communication of relational intimacy and composure. Asynchronous and synchronous computer conferencing and face-to-face groups were examined. Results show that the assignment of long-term versus short-term partnerships has a larger impact on anticipated future interaction reported by computer-mediated, rather than face-to-face, partners. Evidence also shows that anticipation is a more potent predictor of several relational communication dimensions than is communication condition. Implications for theory and practice are identified.     

Question-Asking in Same- and Opposite-Sex Initial Interactions The Effects of Anticipated Future Interaction

The present analysis examined interlocutors’ question-asking under high, moderate, and low levels of anticipated future interaction. Anticipated future interaction with another is presumed to increase persons'motivation to reduce their uncertainty. Prior to conversation, for example, observers engage in higher levels of information-seeking when they expect to meet the target. However, examination of subjects’ use of question-asking strategies suggested this effect does not extend to ongoing interaction. Instead, highest levels of mutual interrogation occurred at moderate levels of anticipated future interaction, in dyads required to negotiate a second encounter. The extent to which interlocutors control subsequent interaction has not been previously identified as a determinant of either uncertainty or uncertainty reduction. Such increased question-asking may be a function of actors’ desire to avoid negative conversational outcomes, a desire that becomes especially salient when actors are allowed to select their social partners.     

Effects of Self-Monitoring and Prospect of Future Interaction on Self-Disclosure Reciprocity During the Acquaintance Process

ABSTRACT High and low self-monitors, who either anticipated or did not anticipate further interaction with a same-sex confederate, alternated with that person in disclosing personal information on three very private topics The confederate spoke first on each topic, presenting either highly intimate or nonintimate information in response to all three issues Content analyses of subjects' disclosures revealed that both high and low self-monitors reciprocated the intimacy and (to a lesser extent) the emotionality of a partner with whom future interaction was not anticipated, but that only the high self-monitors reciprocated the partner's self-disclosures when future interaction with that person was anticipated Supplementary measures suggested that the anticipation of future interaction increased the agentic concerns of all participants, thereby inducing high self-monitors to become even more attentive to situational cues when deciding how or what to disclose, while prompting low self-monitors to rely even less on situational cues and more on personal thoughts and feelings as the basis for their self-presentations Taken together, the results indicate that the prospect of future interaction is an important situational moderator of the self-disclosing tendencies of both high and low self-monitors, and they provide little if any support for recent “instrumental hedonism” interpretations of self-monitoring activities     

From the Analysis of Verbal Data to the Analysis of Organizations: Organizing as a Dialogical Process

The analysis of conversational turn-taking and its implications on time (the speaker cannot completely anticipate the future effects of her/his speech) and sociality (the speech is co-produced by the various speakers rather than by the speaking individual) can provide a useful basis to analyze complex organizing processes and collective action: the actor cannot completely anticipate the future effects of her/his acts and the act is co-produced by multiple actors. This translation from verbal to broader classes of interaction stresses the performativity of speeches, the importance of the situation, the role of semiotic mediations to make temporally and spatially distant “ghosts” present in the dialog, and the dissymmetrical relationship between successive conversational turns, due to temporal irreversibility.     

Computer‐Mediated Communication Effects on Disclosure,Impressions, and Interpersonal Evaluations: Getting to Know One Another a Bit at a Time

This investigation examined how computer‐mediated communication (CMC) partners exchange personal information in initial interactions, focusing on the effects of communication channels on self‐disclosure, question‐asking, and uncertainty reduction. Unacquainted individuals (N = 158) met either face‐to‐face or via CMC. Computer‐mediated interactants exhibited a greater proportion of more direct and intimate uncertainty reduction behaviors than unmediated participants did, and demonstrated significantly greater gains in attributional confidence over the course of the conversations. The use of direct strategies by mediated interactants resulted in judgments of greater conversational effectiveness by partners. Results illuminate some microstructures previously asserted but unverified within social information processing theory (Walther, 1992), and extend uncertainty reduction theory (Berger & Calabrese, 1975) to CMC interaction.     

Talking Health With a Machine: How Does Message Interactivity Affect Attitudes and Cognitions?

By affording interactive communication and natural, human‐like conversations, can media tools affect the way we engage with content in human–machine interactions and influence our attitudes toward that content? A between‐subjects experiment (N = 172) examined the effects of two communication variables: (a) message‐interactivity and (b) conversational tone, in an online health information (Q&A) tool. Findings suggest that informal conversational tone lowers perceptions of relative susceptibility to health risks. Perceived contingency positively mediates the influence of message interactivity on individuals' health attitudes and behavioral intentions whereas perceived interactivity negatively mediates the relationships between these variables. These contrasting mediation effects are further explored via a phantom model analysis that tests two theoretically distinct paths, with implications for both theory and practice.     

The relative importance of different perceptual-cognitive skills during anticipation

We examined whether anticipation is underpinned by perceiving structured patterns or postural cues and whether the relative importance of these processes varied as a function of task constraints. Skilled and less-skilled soccer players completed anticipation paradigms in video-film and point light display (PLD) format. Skilled players anticipated more accurately regardless of display condition, indicating that both perception of structured patterns between players and postural cues contribute to anticipation. However, the Skill × Display interaction showed skilled players’ advantage was enhanced in the video-film condition, suggesting that they make better use of postural cues when available during anticipation. We also examined anticipation as a function of proximity to the ball. When participants were near the ball, anticipation was more accurate for video-film than PLD clips, whereas when the ball was far away there was no difference between viewing conditions. Perceiving advance postural cues appears more important than structured patterns when the ball is closer to the observer, whereas the reverse is true when the ball is far away. Various perceptual-cognitive skills contribute to anticipation with the relative importance of perceiving structured patterns and advance postural cues being determined by task constraints and the availability of perceptual information.     

The impact of contextual information and a secondary task on anticipation performance: An interpretation using cognitive load theory

When performing under severe time constraints, sports performers use kinematic and contextual information to facilitate anticipation. We examined the relative importance of these two information sources and their impact on cognitive load and anticipation performance. Cognitive load theory predicts that adding more information sources to a task will increase cognitive load in less‐skilled but not skilled performers. Skilled and less‐skilled cricket batters anticipated deliveries from bowlers on a life‐size screen under 4 conditions that manipulated access to contextual information and included a secondary task. The presence of context enhanced anticipation accuracy for both skilled and less‐skilled groups, without affecting cognitive load. Skilled performers used sequencing and game‐related contextual information in addition to kinematic information to facilitate anticipation, whereas both groups reported using information pertaining to opponent positioning. Findings highlight the importance of context in anticipation and suggest that the addition of context may not necessarily negatively impact cognitive load.     

Conversations With Able-Bodied and Visibly Disabled Strangers An Adversarial Test of Predicted Outcome Value and Uncertainty Reduction Theories

Conversations with visibly disabled strangers entail unequivocally higher uncertainty and relatively more negative predicted outcome values compared to conversations with able-bodied strangers. Contrasting derivations from uncertainty reduction and predicted outcome value theories were tested by comparing observations associated with respondents’ separate conversations with able-bodied and visibly disabled partners. Four hypotheses were cast to favor predicted outcome value interpretations with respect to information seeking, three global features of the respondent's awareness of the partner's behavior, and the association of information seeking with nonverbal affiliative expressiveness and amount of verbal communication. Statistically significant differences in information seeking and awareness of the partner's behavior favored the predicted outcome value interpretation. Implications for predicted outcome value theory and interaction with visibly disabled conversational partners are discussed.     

Language and thought: the fundamental significance of conversational awareness for cognitive development

According to Piagetian accounts of cognitive development, children’s responses on many tasks reflect the lack of evidence for an operational competence that is conceptual rather than linguistic. In this paper, I show that such accounts assume that young children are endowed with substantial conversational wizardry, allowing them to interpret questions about cognitive tasks as intended by the experimenter. Once it is explicitly recognized that children may be less advanced in their conversational awareness than is commonly assumed, their competence can be assessed more accurately. Recent and new evidence from a variety of sources, such as research on conservation, suggestibility in memory, and theory of mind understanding in deaf and hearing children, converges to indicate that competence is inadequately characterized by a dichotomy between pre-operational and operational logic and that what is developing in children’s cognition is a complex interplay between both conversational and conceptual processes. This evidence is not merely relevant to methodological concerns. It demands a radical shift in cognitive developmental theory and research to account for the importance of children’s conversational awareness.     

Expectations About Initial Interaction An Examination of the Effects of Global Uncertainty

This inquiry extended uncertainty reduction theory to include actors’ uncertainty about acquaintanceship in general (global uncertainty). Study 1 involved examination of the self-reports of 139 female and 85 male participants. Results of the analysis showed that participants high in global uncertainty define initial interaction in comparatively negative ways, more frequently attempt to avoid conversations with unfamiliar targets, perform less effectively when meeting others for the first time, and develop less satisfactory long-term relationships than persons low in global uncertainty. Global uncertainty also combined with participants’ sense of the self-assuredness-awkwardness of first encounters to predict initial interaction performance. Study 2 examined the conversational performance of 48 females and 28 males who had participated in the first investigation. This analysis revealed that, during the first minute of interaction, persons high in global uncertainty engaged in comparatively low levels of question asking but relatively high levels of disclosure. High globally uncertain participants were also rated less competent by their partners than were persons low in global uncertainty. Study 3 explored the relationship between global uncertainty, communication competence, and communication apprehension. Examination of the self-reports of 63 females and 49 males showed that persons high in global uncertainty are apprehensive when meeting strangers and enact acquaintanceship episodes relatively inexpertly, although the magnitude of correlations between the constructs provide strong evidence that global uncertainty is distinguishable from both competence and apprehension. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Differential access to information and anticipated group interaction: impact on individual reasoning

Two studies examined the impact of relative differences in access to information and anticipated group interaction on individual reasoning. On 2 different reasoning tasks (P. C. Wason's [1966] selection task and D. Kahneman & A. Tversky's [1973] lawyer-engineer problem), participants sensing that they knew more in anticipation of group interaction or knew less when not anticipating interaction were less susceptible to typical cognitive biases demonstrated by these tasks. Study 2 also showed that the effect of these social contexts was contingent on the task presentation format. Thus, knowing more in anticipation of group interaction and knowing less when not anticipating group interaction seemingly compensated for task features that enhance suboptimal reasoning strategies. These results illustrate the importance of the social context in which reasoning is situated and are discussed in terms of cognitive tuning, social comparison, and social motivations.     

An Analysis of the Correspondence Between Imagined Interaction Attributes and Functions

Imagined interaction (II) theory has been productive for communication and social cognition scholarship. There is, however, a yet untested assumption within II theory that the 8 attributes are related to all 6 functions and that II functions can be compared and contrasted in terms of II attributes. In addition, there is little research exploring the multidimensional nature of functions and attributes. This article tests the internal structure of II theory by investigating the relations among functions and attributes in 2 studies. Both studies revealed complex associations between the attributes and functions of IIs and provide partial confirmatory evidence for the theory. The discussion integrates findings from these 2 studies and provides avenues for future research.     

Narrative expectations in financial forecasting

How do people form expectations about the future? We use amateur and expert investors' expectations about financial asset prices to study this question. Three experiments contrast the rational expectations assumption from neoclassical economics (investors forecast according to neoclassical financial theory) against two psychological theories of expectation formation—behaviorally informed expectations (investors understand empirical market anomalies and expect these anomalies to occur) and narrative expectations (investors use narrative thinking to predict future prices). Whereas neoclassical financial theory maintains that past public information cannot be used to predict future prices, participants used company performance information revealed before a base price quotation to project future price trends after that quotation (Experiment 1), contradicting rational expectations. Importantly, these projections were stronger when information concerned predictions about a company's future performance rather than actual data about its past performance, suggesting that people not only rely on financially irrelevant (but narratively relevant) information for making predictions but erroneously impose temporal order on that information. These biased predictions had downstream consequences for asset allocation choices (Experiment 2), and these choices were driven in part by affective reactions to the company performance news (Experiment 3). There were some mild effects of expertise, but overall the effects of narrative appear to be consistent across all levels of expertise studied, including professional financial analysts. We conclude by discussing the prospects for a narrative theory of choice that provide new microfoundational insights about economic behavior.     

Nonverbal Expectancies and the Evaluative Consequences of Violations

This report reviews the construct of expectancy and its relevance to understanding communication phenomena. Given the shortage of empirically based knowledge about what constitute expected and unexpected interpersonal behaviors and how they are evaluated, a two-part experiment was conducted to determine the expectedness and evaluation of three nonverbal variables: touch, conversational distance, and posture. The possible moderating effects of communicator attractiveness, status, and gender were also examined. Respondents (N = 622) viewed photographs of an attractive or unattractive male or female stimulus interacting with a male or female partner, attributed to be of same, higher, or lower status, who displayed one of seven forms of touch or one of nine combinations of posture and proximity. Respondents rated the appropriateness, typicality, and desirability of the observed behavior. Results demonstrated that several behaviors are expected and positively valenced, while others qualify as positive or negative violations of expectations. Attractiveness influenced expectancies and evaluations; gender and status had limited effects. Implications for information processing and nonverbal expectancy violations theory are discussed.     

Good conversations: Grounding,convergence, and richness

We apply three communication theories (the collaborative theory of language use, communication accommodation theory, and media richness theory) to aspects of conversational structure (openings, closings) and communicative setting (audiovisual, written) in order to make predictions about how people will feel about conversational interactions. We distinguish between two sources of information that interlocutors use to evaluate conversations: conversational outcomes and subjective conversational experience. We propose that positive subjective conversational experience comes about when interlocutors reach common ground with one another and do so with the least required effort possible (collaborative theory of language use), converge on their language use and communicative behaviors (communication accommodation theory), and select the appropriate medium for their conversation to take place (media richness theory). This positive subjective conversational experience is an important component of good conversations.     

Control motivation and attributions for performance

Two experiments examined the relationship between the desire for effective control over performance outcomes and attributions of causality for those outcomes. In Experiment 1, subjects were led to believe that they had either succeeded at or failed a test that was either unimportant or important. As predicted, failure of the important test was attributed more to lack of effort (a controllable cause) and less to lack of ability (an uncontrollable cause) than was failure of the unimportant test. In Experiment 2, all subjects were led to believe that they had failed a test. Once again, subjects were informed that the test was either important or unimportant. In addition, half the subjects were told that they would be undergoing more tests in a later testing session, while half were not informed of any future testing. As in Experiment 1, subjects failing the important test attributed their failure less to lack of ability than did subjects failing the unimportant test. The anticipation of future testing interacted with test importance in its effects on attributions to ability. Subjects performing the unimportant task attributed their failure more to lack of ability when anticipating future performance than when not. Attributions of subjects performing an important task were not affected by the anticipation of future performance. Results were discussed in terms of the need for control over performance outcomes.     

Conversation and remembering: Bartlett revisited

Bartlett's book Remembering (1932) is frequently cited as a major forerunner of the information processing approach to memory and cognition. This approach has itself been criticized by one of its founders, Ulric Neisser (1982), for its narrowness and artificiality compared with the nature of remembering in natural contexts. A re-examination of Bartlett's work demonstrates that it offers little basis for an information processing approach, but rather that it offers the foundation of a much broader, culturally contextualized and functional approach to the study of everyday remembering. Three particular themes are discussed: the integration of social judgements and affective reactions with cognition, the role of conventional symbols in the coding and communication of experience, and the importance of conversational discourse. Bartlett's best-known studies, involving the method of serial reproduction, are shown to be microcosmic demonstrations of the process that he was most concerned with—that of conventionalization of symbols rather than of the workings of an individual's memory. It is argued, again beginning with Bartlett, that everyday remembering may be most fruitfully studied in terms of its personal and social functions, and particularly through its realization in discourse.     

Setting events controlling social verbal exchanges between students with developmental delays

The peer social verbal exchanges (social conversational units) between four developmentally delayed students were studied as a function of setting events. A single conversational unit consisted of a verbal exchange in which each individual functioned as both speaker and listener. Each unit included a three term verbal contingency. Data were collected by trained observers viewing videotapes of 20-minute sessions in which running times were burned onto the videotape. Frequencies of social conversational units were measured under two conditions. Comparisons were made between sessions in which the teacher responded only when spoken to and sessions in which the teacher was absent using a combined reversal and multiple schedule design. Results showed that peer conversational units emerged at high rates when the teacher was absent and at low or nonexistent rates when the teacher responded only when spoken to in the living room setting. The setting and audience control for peer verbal exchanges were discussed as functions possibly of either a punishing audience, establishing operations, or response deprivation.