The Effects of Stimulus Medium and Feedback on the Judgment of Rapport

The efficacy of cognitive feedback and the relative ineffectiveness of outcome feedback has been well documented in the judgment literature (Balzer, Doherty, & O′Connor, 1989). The relevant research leading to this conclusion, however, has been characterized by artificially constructed tasks with rigidly controlled stimulus properties which may not be representative of many real-world ecologies. The present study examined the effects of one form of cognitive feedback, task information, and outcome feedback in such an in vivo setting, that is, on a task which required subjects to make inferences about the level of rapport present in videotaped real-life social interactions. The two types of feedback were also compared on a second task involving a simplified, quantified, graphical representation of the relevant cues that had been extracted from the video display. Results from the graphically presented displays replicated earlier findings supporting the superiority of cognitive feedback. Results from the video display, however, showed exactly the opposite: outcome feedback here was superior to cognitive feedback in increasing performance accuracy.