Strategic Interpersonal Communication

John A. Daly,John M. Wiemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136563751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

This book discusses how people go about achieving their social goals through human symbolic interaction. The editors' collective presumption is that there are more or less typical ways that people attempt to obtain desired outcomes -- be they persuasive, informative, conflictive, or the like -- through communication. Representing a first summary of research done by scholars, primarily in the communication discipline, this volume seeks to identify and understand how it is that people achieve what they want through social interaction. Under the very broad label of strategies, this research has sought to: * identify critical social goals such as gaining compliance, generating affinity, resolving social conflict, and offering information;
* specify, for each goal, the ways, or strategies, by which people can go about achieving these goals;
* determine predictors of strategy selection -- that is, why does a person opt for one strategy over others to obtain the desired end? The research also reflects the attention the field of communication has given to strategy issues in the past 15 years. The chapters describe research on the ways in which people achieve different goals, and summarize existing research and theory on the attainment of social goals. Readers will gain insight into many of the issues that exist regardless of the strategy being discussed. Thus, this volume may not include chapters on topics such as ways people elicit or offer disclosure, ways people demonstrate anger, or ways people create guilt, but the issues that appear consistently throughout the various chapters should apply equally to these. Finally, the essays in this volume provide not only a summary of what has been accomplished to date, but also an initial theoretic map for future research concerning strategic interpersonal communication.

Chapter 1

Acquiring Social Information

Charles R. Berger
University of Californ, Davis

Kathy Kellermann
University of Californ, Davis

The considerable diversity of social goals for which strategic communicators strive is reflected in the variety of titles of this volume's chapters. In their interactions with others, social actors and actresses seek to achieve such goals as controlling their conversations, comforting others, gaining compliance from others, and inducing others to like them (Graham, Argyle, & Furnham, 1980; Kellermann & Kim, 1991). In these and other endeavors, persons employ their knowledge of themselves and others, their knowledge about social interaction processes and their communication skills to achieve their goals. These three components of goal-oriented communicative action do not always work together; that is, persons may know the optimal strategies for achieving a particular interaction goal but be unable to muster the requisite communication, skills to do so. Conversely, some persons may have high communication skill levels but be prevented from successful goal attainment by faulty knowledge.

Although faulty knowledge or lack of skill may prevent interactants from achieving their social goals, these deficits are not immutable. Persons are capable of acquiring information necessary for generating new knowledge, correcting faulty knowledge, and remediating skill deficits. This chapter focuses on the first of these three problems; nevertheless, the importance of the latter two should not be minimized. Knowledge may be power, but in the domain of strategic communication, praxis assumes an equally important role in the production of optimal performance. We assume that although individuals bring general knowledge about persons and interaction procedures with them to particular interaction episodes, they must acquire specific information about their interaction partners and the current interaction context to achieve their interaction goals. Even individuals who possess large amounts of general knowledge about persons and interaction procedures must acquire specific information in order to be successful; thus, the acquisition of social and personal information is an important goal in almost every strategic communication episode.

We take it as a given that most interaction situations involve the simultaneous pursuit of a number of interaction goals (Berger, 1988a). For instance, when an individual tries to persuade a friend to go to a movie, he or she may actually be trying to accomplish two or more goals at once, for example, persuasion and maintaining the friendship. The pursuit of multiple goals can constrain the choice and implementation of interaction strategies. The existence of a friendship-maintenance goal might prevent an individual from employing certain aversive compliance-gaining strategies and tactics. The goal of acquiring information about others is frequently pursued along with other social goals and in many cases may be a precondition for the attainment of other goals as the procurement of information about others is crucial in retrieving or developing plans to reach social goals. Although our discussion focuses on the goal of information acquisition, one should not lose sight of the fact that such a focus ignores the complex goal and planning interactions that accrue from the simultaneous striving for multiple interaction goals

It is also important to recognize that as persons engage in strategic interactions their goals may change (Berger, 1988a). Thus, the goal of becoming a friend to another may transmute to the goal of becoming a lover as a relationship progresses. Goal metamorphosis is especially important in the social information-gathering context. We suspect that social information acquisition is undertaken generally to achieve such social goals as ingratiation, compliance-gaining, and the like. Once sufficient information is gathered, the social information acquisition goal transmutes to one of these more primary goals. Of course, the goal of acquiring social information might reemerge later in an ongoing interaction if a primary goal is not being reached. Understanding goal hierarchies and their dynamics is crucial to the study of strategic communication (Berger, 1988a; Lichtenstein & Brewer, 1980; McCann & Higgins, 1988).

Within the context of the assumptions and caveats just outlined, in the remainder of this chapter we explore the following issues related to social information acquisition. First, the functions served by social information acquisition are considered. Second, various strategies used to acquire social information are examined. Third, research findings concerning the use of information acquisition strategies are presented. Finally, some directions for future research are suggested.

WHY SEEK SOCIAL INFORMATION?

The understandings that persons have of their social interactions are determined by their interpretations of: (a) the context within which the interaction occurs, (b) the actions of their interaction partners, and (c) their own actions. These interpretations are, in part, the product of the processing of inputs by various schemata. We now turn our attention to the functions served by social information acquisition in schematic processing.

Instantiating Appropriate Schemata

Taylor and Crocker (1981) argued that well-articulated schemata speed information processing. In order to gain the advantages of more rapid information processing, however, it is necessary to find schemata from a long-term store that are appropriate for processing inputs from the present situation. Although a voluminous literature exists concerning the effects of schemata on memory for persons and events (Hastie et al., 1980; Wyer & Srull, 1984), relatively little is known about the schemata selection process. Presumably, certain critical cues “point to” potentially appropriate schemata. For example, if a person says little in interactions with others, avoids eye contact while speaking, and prefers reading books to going to parties, a fellow interactant might be led to instantiate an introvert schema with which to understand and respond to the person during their interactions. There is, of course, the nagging question of how perceivers know that these cues point to an introvert prototype in the first place. Do persons need schemata to understand the cues that point to still other schemata?

Indications are that in initial interactions between strangers, persons ask questions that may aid them in selecting schemata for processing subsequent inputs from their interactions. Several studies show that the first few minutes of interactions between strangers are dominated by the asking and answering of questions (Berger, 1973; Berger & Kellermann, 1983; Calabrese, 1975; Kellermann, 1984a). These questions are predominantly concerned with such background and demographic characteristics of the interactants as occupation, place of birth, current residence, and so on. Answers to these questions may determine directly what schemata are called up, and the paralinguistic and other nonverbal cues that accompany questions and answers may also provide input for the selection of appropriate schemata (Scherer, 1979). Berger (1975) reported that the background information exchanged during the first few minutes of initial interactions is used to predict attitudes and opinions not yet disclosed by the interaction participants. This finding suggests that persons may use background information to select schemata and develop predictions from the selected schemata.

Filling in Incomplete Schemata

Persons may access relevant schemata for processing; however, for a variety of reasons these schemata may be incomplete. Young children frequently experience this problem, but adults may also find themselves processing persons and situations with gap-ridden schemata. For example, a child who has been to several restaurants and developed a rudimentary script for processing restaurant action sequences may be befuddled when the waiter delivers cold forks (for eating salad) or when the waiter vacuums up crumbs from the tablecloth with a small vacuum cleaner. Even adult diners might be taken aback when hot towels for washing their face and hands are delivered after being seated. Similar kinds of gaps can occur in both person and role schemata with equally confounding effects.

Persons can respond in at least three ways to gaps in their knowledge structures. First, persons can ask questions of others who are perceived to have the requisite knowledge to fill in their gaps. The child who does not know what to do with a cold fork might ask a parent “Why is this fork cold?” or “What do I do with this fork?” Second, persons can watch what others do and imitate them. We suspect that for reasons related to self-esteem maintenance and projecting a sophisticated and knowledgeable persona, many adults are more likely to follow the latter course of action, whereas children are more likely to ask questions. A third potential response to an incomplete schemata might be to act without acquiring any information and to see whether one's actions produce desired outcomes. This trial-and-error process would seem to be the least efficacious of the three; however, we suspect that it is employed when self-presentational concerns are salient to some individuals.

Fabricating Schemata

There are times when persons lack schemata for processing information about persons or event sequences. Again, this situation is more likely to arise with children, but adults may experience this condition with its attendant uncertainties. The problem here is not one of missing pieces but the complete lack of knowledge concerning the focal situation or person. Although this type of situation might seem intractable in terms of both understanding and the generation of meaningful action, the fact is that both adults and children manage to act in non-random ways in such circumstances. How is this possible?

There are at least two answers to this question. First, although the focal person or situation may be completely unique, information processors may see some similarities between the focal person or situation and persons or situations that are already known. This reminding process is at the heart of Schank's (1982) model of memory processes. Given these remindings, persons can feel that they understand the person or the situation and can respond in potentially meaningful ways. It is difficult to imagine many persons or situations in which individuals would be at a complete loss to respond in more or less understandable ways, although children might be more prone to experience such complete losses of ability to respond. Second, through both observation and interaction persons can acquire the information necessary to build schemata. This bottom-up processing is both time consuming and effortful, but once schemata are constructed, they can be utilized in a top-down fashion at a later time. Much of the research done under the rubric of social cognition carries with it the assumption that persons already have numerous schemata for processing both person and event information. As a consequence, the process of schemata fabrication has been little researched and, as a result, is little understood.

Nonepistemic Functions

Gathering social information to instantiate appropriate schemata, to fill gaps in them, and to fabricate new ones points to the epistemic function served by social information seeking. It would be a critical error to assume, however, that all social information-gathering activity subserves this function. Persons may deploy actions ostensibly aimed at acquiring information but they may actually have quite different intentions. There are several possible nonepistemic functions that social information-gathering activities can serve; moreover, particular actions may fulfill both epistemic and nonepistemic functions simultaneously.

Mishler (1975) argued that question asking can be used by parents to exert control in conversations with their children. Parents ask questions that obligate their children to answer. Many adults recall that, as children, when they arrived home from elementary school their parents would frequently begin conversations with them by asking what they did in school that day. Their answers to this question prompted more follow-up questioning from their parents, thus allowing parents to continue their role as question askers. We do not mean to imply that parents question their children about their day at school solely to control their children's behavior. No doubt, many parents pay considerable attention to the answers their children provide and wish to know how their children are doing at school. Nevertheless, the parallel control function played by question asking cannot be overlooked.

Questions can also be used as directives (Ervin-Tripp, 1976). A parent trying to induce a child to choose a particular article of clothing at a store might say, “That's a nice one, isn't it?” Or, instead of saying “Let's go to the movies tonight,” one friend might say to another, “Wouldn't it be nice to go to a movie tonight?” In both examples, the “right” answer or the answer desired by the asker is embedded within the question itself. In research related to the directive function of questions, Merritt (1976) discovered the conditions under which questions are interpreted as requests for information versus requests for service in customer-salesperson transactions, again demonstrating the multifunctionality of question asking.

Although the foregoing discussion has focused on various nonepistemic functions served by question asking, information-gathering activities other than question asking also can be multifunctional. For example, in order to ingratiate one's self to another, a person might be highly attentive to the other during a conversation. Showing interest may involve not only such verbal behaviors as asking questions, but such nonverbal behaviors as eye contact, touch, gesticulation, and the like. In addition, persons might reduce the amount of talking they do to effect perceptions of attentiveness. Some of these actions, for example, talking less and increasing eye contact, might increase both perceived attentiveness and information intake about the other. The lesson to be gleaned here is that singular actions may serve multiple functions. Information-seeking activities like question asking and increased attentiveness may subserve the epistemic goals of schemata instantiation, gap filling, and schemata fabrication; moreover, such actions may be the means for reaching ingratiation, conversational control, persuasion, and other nonepistemic goals. The remainder of this chapter focuses on strategies and tactics for acquiring social information, however, the issue of the multifunctionality of strategic actions should be kept in mind.

STRATEGIES FOR ACQUIRING SOCIAL INFORMATION

We now consider general strategies for gathering social information. First, however, it is important to differentiate between strategies and tactics, a distinction that has frequently been ignored in discussions of strategic communication (Berger, 1985). We view strategies as cognitive phenomena like plans or scripts that provide general guidelines for action. Berger (1988a) has compiled a number of definitions of the plan construct (Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960; Schank & Abelson, 1977; Wilensky, 1983) and suggested the following synthetic definition of a plan: “ A plan specifies the actions that are necessary for the attainment of a goal or several goals. Plans vary in their levels of abstraction. Highly abstract plans can spawn more detailed plans. Plans contain alternative paths for goal attainment from which the social actor can choose” (Berger, 1988a, p. 96). Plans are not the actions themselves but abstract cognitive representations of action sequences; they represent kinds of strat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Getting Your Own Way
• Chapter 1 Acquiring Social Information
• Chapter 2 Compliance-Gaining Goals: An Inductive Analysis of Actors’ Goal Types, Strategies, and Successes
• Chapter 3 The Language of Control in Interpersonal Communication
• Chapter 4 Affinity Seeking
• Chapter 5 Comforting Messages: Features, Functions, and Outcomes
• Chapter 6 Communication Strategies in Conflict and Mediation
• Chapter 7 Deception: Strategic and Nonstrategic Communication
• Chapter 8 Strategies for Effective Communication and Adaptation in Intergroup Contexts
• Chapter 9 Strategic Functions of Nonverbal Exchange
• Author Index
• Subject Index