Planning Strategic Interaction

Attaining Goals Through Communicative Action

Charles R. Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000149289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In an earlier era, the communication field was dominated by the study of mediated and unmediated message effects during which considerable research focused on the attitudinal and action consequences of exposure to messages. A more catholic purview of the communication process exists today. This more encompassing perspective does not deny the importance of studying message effects, but raises the additional question of how individuals generate messages in the first place. While the earlier era of communication research was dominated by studies that focused on attitude and behavior change as primary dependent variables, such variables as message comprehension have begun to emerge in this new era. The focus on communication and cognition has led, paradoxically, to a more intense focus on social interaction processes. The theory and research presented in this volume seeks to strike a balance between the internal workings of the individual cognitive system on the one hand and the outer world of social interaction on the other. Whether or not the theory and research stands the test of time, it is clear that complete cognitive accounts of social interaction cannot confine themselves to mere descriptions of the cognitive structures and processes that are responsible for message production and comprehension. Explicit links must be made between these cognitive structures and processes and the workings of social interaction. This work takes a modest step in that direction.

Chapter 1

Introduction

That social interaction among people is patterned and thus somewhat predictable is an assertion with which few students of human communication would disagree. If this assertion were in serious doubt, trying to discern and explain social interaction phenomena would be a highly dubious enterprise. The patterning of human interaction is reflected by the fact that a very large proportion the everyday give-and-take between people is carried off without a hitch. Among such interactions are the countless successful daily commercial transactions that take place between total strangers, as well as interactions that transpire in institutions such as schools, universities, and hospitals. Even when such mundane encounters involve misunderstandings, disagreements, and overt conflict, the verbal and nonverbal acts that comprise these problematic interactions, for better or worse, frequently adhere to well-defined structures; in short, that social interaction among humans is patterned is hardly debatable.

In contrast to this virtual consensus regarding the structured nature of social interaction is the considerable disagreement over the most fruitful perspectives from which to predict and explain patterns of interaction. At one extreme, adherents to a radical behaviorist epistemology (Skinner, 1953; Watson, 1924) advocate a metatheoretical perspective emphasizing the detection of empirical regularities and behavioral contingencies in social interaction, while minimizing the role of explanatory mechanisms internal to individuals involved in the interaction. At the other extreme are those theorists who feature the role of cognitive processes in the production and comprehension of discourse, and minimize the role of environmental contingencies in the explanation of communicative conduct in general and social interaction in particular (Chomsky, 1965). These theorists emphasize the biological bases of language, genetic preprogramming, and the role played by neurological development in language acquisition. Located between these two extremes are social behaviorists like Cooley (1902) and Mead (1934) who viewed the acquisition and practice of communicative competencies in both individual and social realms as a process involving the interplay between external events and internal mental processes. In particular, Cooley and Mead argued that individuals can attain neither a conception of self nor a sense of social decorum anchored in community standards of conduct in the absence of social interaction with others. In a similar vein, social constructionists have contended that social realities are jointly negotiated by those involved in social interactions (Gergen, 1985).

Although these various perspectives are not necessarily competing, doctrinaire adherence to any one of them tends to propel the researcher in the direction of particular theoretical explanations and methodological approaches to the study of social interaction. At the one extreme, cognitive approaches emphasize information processing structures and processes internal to the individual as potential explanations for observed interaction patterns; at the other extreme, radical behaviorists search for the relevant reinforcement contingencies that might be responsible for shaping such behavior. Methodologically, cognitive approaches direct researchers toward the assessment of mental processes by measuring attributes of attention and memory, whereas behavioristically inclined researchers manipulate reinforcement contingencies to determine whether such changes produce concomitant variations in observed behavior.

Approaching the study of social interaction from either of these two extremes is likely to be less productive than adopting a purview that recognizes the potential importance of both cognitive and social factors in the production and processing of social interaction (Levelt, 1989). Clearly, some people perform better than others while pursuing particular communicative goals in specific social interaction contexts. One potential explanation for such individual differences in communicative competence emphasizes the amount and types of knowledge about social interaction that individuals bring with them to social encounters. Cognitive approaches could explain how such knowledge is generated, stored, and retrieved during social interaction episodes; however, such accounts would be incomplete if they did not consider how individuals’ social interaction history affects the knowledge base being utilized to produce and understand action, and how current actions influence the structure and content of knowledge structures responsible for guiding and comprehending the actions of others.

Invoking this social dimension highlights the dynamic nature of human interaction and calls into question the utility of simple, linear information-processing formulations for explaining observed social interaction patterns. The information processing demands entailed by these social dynamics may cause interactants to oscillate rapidly between producing social action guided by well-developed knowledge structures like scripts, plans, or memory organization packets (MOPs; Berger, 1995a; Hammond, 1989a, 1989b; Kellermann, 1991, 1995; Riesbeck & Schank, 1989; Schank, 1982, 1986; Schank & Abelson, 1977) and social action driven primarily by detailed online processing of incoming data, thus producing socially communicative conduct that is at once both automatic and strategic (Kellermann, 1992).

Increasingly, those interested in the study of interpersonal communication processes have elected to view the study of human interaction from a strategic perspective (Cody & McLaughlin, 1990; Daly & Wiemann, 1994; Frese & Sabini, 1985; Kuhl & Beckman, 1985; Nuttin, 1984; Pervin, 1989; Read & Miller, 1989; von Cranach, Kalbermatten, Indermuhle, & Gugler, 1982). The general postulate underlying this approach to the study of social interaction is that in their daily interactions with others, people frequently seek to reach goals by employing a variety of interaction strategies and tactics. Although the great bulk of research reported in this strategic communication tradition has been descriptive, there have been a few attempts to enumerate the goals for which individuals strive (McCann & Higgins, 1988). Considerably more work has been done to identify the strategies people use to attain various goals in social interaction situations.

Based on the seminal work of Marwell and Schmitt (1967), a number of researchers have attempted to delineate strategies that individuals use to gain compliance from others (Boster & Stiff, 1984; Cody, Canary, & Smith, 1994; Cody, McLaughlin, & Jordan, 1980; Cody, McLaughlin, & Schneider, 1981; deTurck, 1985; Dillard & Burgoon, 1985; Falbo, 1977; Falbo & Peplau, 1980; Kellermann & Cole, 1994; Miller, Boster, Roloff, & Seibold, 1977, 1987; Rule & Bisanz, 1987; Rule, Bisanz, & Kohn, 1985; Schenk-Hamlin, Wiseman, & Georgacarakos, 1982; Sillars, 1980). In addition to this work on the compliance-gaining goal, others have studied strategies and tactics individuals employ to reach such goals as affinity-seeking (Bell & Daly, 1984; Daly & Kreiser, 1994; Douglas, 1987), comforting (Burleson, 1994), ingratiation (Jones, 1964; Jones & Wortman, 1973), acquiring personal information from others (Berger & Kellermann, 1994), ending close relationships (Baxter, 1979), and assessing the state of relationships (Baxter & Wilmot, 1984).

Although these studies of strategic communication have yielded a wealth of descriptive data about the strategies and tactics used to achieve goals, there are significant problems with the general direction of this research tradition. These problems are especially apparent with respect to the compliance-gaining literature because this particular strategic communication goal has received the lion’s share of research attention. Nonetheless, although the ensuing discussion focuses on the compliance-gaining literature, the problems delineated in this research corpus are germane to studies of other strategic communication goals.

First, and perhaps most important, there has been virtually no theoretical basis offered for the entire research enterprise, although some have attempted to begin to remedy this problem (Berger, 1988a, 1995a; Dillard, 1990a, 1990b; Greene, 1990). Researchers have been content to shift their attention from one social goal to the next and to describe the communication strategies and tactics people employ to achieve the goal of most recent interest. Although a few studies have examined the conditions under which one strategy is more likely to be deployed than another for reaching a particular goal (Miller et al., 1977), the variables manipulated in these studies generally do not flow from well-articulated theoretical frameworks. Rather, they are variables that researchers intuitively feel should affect strategy selection.

This atheoretical approach to the study of strategic communication has yielded at least two extremely troublesome outcomes. First, in an exhaustive comparison of various compliance-gaining studies, Kellermann and Cole (1994) concluded that the various strategy lists generated in compliance-gaining studies are ambiguous to the point that studies cannot be compared. This confused state of affairs is reminiscent of the heyday of instinct psychology when instinct theorists were consumed by debates concerning the relative merits of each other’s instinct lists. Second, attempts to identify factors affecting strategy choice appear to suffer from similar confusion. Hunter and Boster (1987) concluded that a single dimension related to verbal aggressiveness, rather than more complex sets of dimensions revealed in earlier factor analytic research, may underlie choices of compliance-gaining strategies, (Kaminski, McDermott, & Boster, 1977; Miller et al., 1977; Roloff & Barnicott, 1978, 1979). Given this finding and the welter of inconsistencies regarding the identifiability and comparability of compliance-gaining strategies (Kellermann & Cole, 1994), it is not surprising that message selection data do not predict either reported or actual compliance-gaining activity (Dillard, 1988), and that situational dimensions ge erally do not predict strategy choice (Dillard & Burgoon, 1985). The central premise of this volume is that approaching the study of strategic communication from a plan-based perspective helps to fill this theoretical lacuna, and suggests more productive research avenues.

Accompanying the atheoretical cast of most strategic communication research is the heavy reliance on self-report measures of strategic conduct. The bulk of research done in this area has placed research participants in hypothetical situations, as opposed to actual interactions with others. Even more limiting is the fact that research participants are frequently given lists of strategies from which to choose. Typically, these lists contain global descriptions of strategies rather than detailed descriptions of action sequences that might be used to achieve the goal in question. The problems with such lists are manifold. For example, there is no guarantee that such lists include all of the strategies that individuals might use to attain the goal in question (Clark, 1979). Because there may be considerable variation in the ways individuals instantiate the same global strategy in their verbal and nonverbal actions, responses to these pre-fabricated lists may be misleading. Perhaps because of these and other problems, Kellermann and Cole (1994) found a lack of comparability of such lists across several compliance-gaining studies.

In view of the meta-theoretical perspective outlined previously, it is apparent that checklist approaches to the study of strategic communication fail to capture the dynamic properties of goal-directed social interactions. During ongoing social interactions, individuals may modify strategies based on their assessments of the actions they see their co-interactants taking. Perhaps, checklist studies indicate the first strategy an individual might use in an actual social interaction situation; however, this “first strike” view may tell us very little about subsequent strategic action, as interaction sequences unfold over time (deTurck, 1985). It is also possible that the local circumstances of a specific goal-directed interaction might be such that strategic actors modify their strategies before interactions actually commence. Individuals might conclude that the time is not ripe for any strategy to be deployed, perhaps because the target appears to be unreceptive to the influence attempt or because other situational conditions are not optimal for pursuing the goal (e.g., when concerns for privacy are salient and others are currently present).

The limitations of self-reports of compliance-gaining strategies led Miller (1987) to assert: “If persuasion researchers want to understand how compliance-gaining message strategies function in interpersonal settings—or, for that matter, how any symbolic inducement functions in any communicative setting—they must come to grips with the necessity of observing actual message exchanges” (p. 474). Miller’s admonition is consistent with the meta-theoretical stance taken here: In order to gain a fuller understanding of strategic communication phenomena, it is necessary to consider simultaneously the cognitive structures and processes responsible for generating strategic action as well as the patterns of interaction that are ultimately displayed as interaction participants pursue their goals. To confine one’s empirical purview to the narrow domain of the self-report is to guarantee that significant portions of the strategic communication process remain both empirically untapped and theoretically unexplained.

In this regard, it is notable that very little of the research reported in strategic communication literature has been concerned with the degree to which various strategies and tactics are effective in bringing about desired end states. This dearth of strategy effectiveness research may be explained, at least in part, by the heavy reliance strategic communication researchers have placed on self-report measures that, by their very nature, do not lead to asking questions about interaction effectiveness. Interaction effectiveness data must be derived from observations of behavior gathered during ongoing social encounters (e.g., Wiemann, 1977), and collecting such observations has been the exception rather than the rule in this line of research. Finally, it is difficult to defend this dearth of strategy effectiveness research because the “effectiveness question” is one that seems to be at the forefront of many communication practitioners’ thinking. Ultimately, such individuals want to know what works.

Because of the theoretical vacuum and the methodological monism of the modern strategic communication research enterprise, a number of fundamental questions about goal-directed social interaction remain to be addressed. How do individuals develop strategies for attaining various goals during social interactions? By what processes are these strategies altered when unanticipated contingencies arise during the course of interactions? How are strategies translated to social action? How can the effectiveness of various strategies be assessed? How is strategy effectiveness related to interaction outcomes? This volume touches on all of these questions, some more than others, and in the process of trying to answer them, no doubt raises still more questions. Nevertheless, the aim of the current presentation is to begin to fill in some of the gaping conceptual and empirical voids that persist in the strategic communication research corpus.

Strategies and Tactics

In most discussions of strategic communication, the terms strategy and tactic are used interchangeably (e.g., Wheeless, Barraclough, & Stewart, 1983). The blurring of the distinction between these two terms is unfortunate, because it is theoretically useful to distinguish between broad plans for social action and particular verbal and nonverbal actions used to realize these abstract strategies at the level of social action. For instance, one might decide to employ the strategy of reward to induce compliance from another; however, there are numerous ways in which such a broad strategy could be implemented at the level of behavioral tactics. One might use verbal praise or money as an inducement for compliance; even within the category “verbal praise” there are a very large number of combinations of verbal discourse that could be used to actualize the reward strategy at the tactical level. Moreover, the proffering of money could be accompanied by a large array of alternative verbal and nonverbal action sequences. The money might be handed to the person with no verbalizations whatsoever and a straight face, or it might be given with a smile, a pat on the back, and a “job well done.” Both of these tactical sequences are potentially rewarding, but they are quite different at the level of social action. Strategies, then, are abstract mental structures that subsume broad classes of action alternatives. Tactics are observable action se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 A Plan-Based Theory of Strategic Communication
• Chapter 3 Plan Complexity
• Chapter 4 The Hierarchy Principle
• Chapter 5 Plan Effectiveness and Communicative Performance
• Chapter 6 Message Planning Theory and Communication Theory
• Chapter 7 Message Planning and Communicative Praxis
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index