Communication and Social Cognition

Theories and Methods

David R. Roskos-Ewoldsen, Jennifer L. Monahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135604110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Communication and Social Cognition represents the explosion of work in the field of social cognition over the past 25 years. Expanding the contribution made by Social Cognition and Communication, published in 1982, this scholarly collection updates the study of communication from a social cognitive perspective, with contributions from well-known experts and promising new scholars in diverse areas of communication.Organized into sections--message production, interpersonal communication, media, and social influence--the collection reflects the areas in which social cognition theories have become integral in understanding communicative processes, and in which a proliferation of scholarship has emerged. Readers are informed of the current major trends in social cognition research, and are introduced to its history. Throughout the text, chapter authors highlight both theoretical and methodological aspects of research, encouraging communication scholars to include social cognition in their research, and, likewise, promoting communication to social cognition researchers. The volume addresses the future of social cognition, including the most fitting directions in which to take scholarship, emerging theories in the field, and the methods currently yielding the most promising results. Communication and Social Cognition appeals to scholars, researchers, and advanced students in communication and psychology. It can be used as a textbook in graduate courses related to social cognition, social influence, message production, interpersonal communication, media effects, and message design.

1

Celebrating Social Cognition and Communication

Jennifer Monahan
University of Georgia

David R. Roskos-Ewoldsen
University of Alabama

We see the goal of this volume as celebrating and affirming the study of communication from a social cognition perspective. There is much to celebrate as scholars working in such disparate subdisciplines as political communication, social influence, group communication, information systems, health communication, and mass communication have incorporated social cognition into their research programs. The reader will find that this volume provides a synthesis of some of the most exciting research in social cognition and communication research over the past 25 years.

Defining social cognition often depends on the interests of the authors involved in the writing. From a psychological perspective, social cognition research is often conceived of as the study of the specific cognitive processes that are involved when we think about or perceive the social world. From such a perspective, memory, perception, and thought are critical cognitive concepts and researchers ask questions about how social information is encoded, stored, and retrieved from memory; how social knowledge is structured and represented in memory; and what processes are involved when individuals make judgments and social decisions.

In Roloff and Berger’s (1982) volume, Communication and Social Cognition, social cognition is defined as “the organized thoughts people have about human interaction” (p.). Thus, their definition focuses almost exclusively on interpersonal interactions (see Eveland & Seo, chap. 13, this volume). In this volume, we take a broader perspective than Roloff and Berger to include mass communication, but a more interaction-oriented perspective than do most psychologists. We suggest there are four broad ways in which communication scholars study social cognition processes: (a) the processes that impact the generation of messages, (b) the processing of messages and social information, (c) the generation and storage of mental models, and (d) the generation and perception of shared cognitions. In this volume, you will find exemplars of each of these broad perspectives. Some chapters examine the cognitive processes that underlie how individuals form messages to communicate with or influence others (see, e.g., Berger, chap. 3; Greene & Graves, chap. 2; Hamilton, chap. 18; Meyer, chap. 17; Solomon & Theiss, chap. 6; Wilson & Feng, chap. 4). This perspective, as Greene and Graves (chap. 2) note, tries to account for the “activities carried out in social interaction, by social actors pursuing social ends, in contexts governed by social rules and norms” (p. XXX). Other chapters focus not so much on how social cognition affects message production, but rather on how individuals form impressions, attitudes, and beliefs via the media or interpersonal messages (see, e.g., Arpan, Rhodes, & Roskos-Ewoldsen, chap. 15; Eveland & Seo, chap. 13; Lannutti & Monahan, chap. 10; Manusov, chap. 7; Nabi, chap. 16; Oliver, Ramasubramanian, & Kim, chap. 12; Shrum, chap. 11). This perspective tries to account for how people process messages generated by others or the media and the outcomes of these messages on behavior such as stereotype formation, voting, and risk decision making. Other chapters focus on shared cognitions, or how individuals jointly form cognitions via communication (see, e.g., Koerner, chap. 9; Roloff & Van Swol, chap. 8; Solomon & Theiss, chap. 6). Finally, other chapters examine mental model formation and change when the models we construct are about other people and of media events (see, e.g., Roloff & Van Swol, chap. 6; Roskos-Ewoldsen, Roskos-Ewoldsen, Yang, & Lee, chap. 14). Thus, like all social cognition researchers, our interests involve how humans process and use social information. However, because this volume is not only about social cognition but also about communication, the work represented in this volume examines social cognition processes as such processes inform our understanding of or engagement in communicative acts.

With this broad-based understanding of communication and social cognition, we easily could have generated three volumes but, alas, the publisher requested but one. We lament there was insufficient space for separate chapters on social cognition theories in health communication, organizational communication, advertising, or marketing. Moreover, we did not have the space to do an entire section on personality-based theories. When making decisions about what to include and what to regrettably leave out, we began by considering the areas in which social cognition appears to have made great strides since 1982. In our estimation, message production and compliance or social influence are two areas that have seen an explosion of scholarship, theories, and exciting new developments. In addition, we see a wide-ranging use of social cognition theories in both interpersonal and mass communication. Therefore, the book is divided into these four major parts: Message Production, Interpersonal Communication, Mass Media, and Social Influence. Although this organizing scheme highlights certain aspects of each scholar’s contributions, it may hide the fact that many chapters apply across the sections. For example, although the attribution chapter is located in the interpersonal communication section, attribution theory is used widely in the social sciences to explain message production, media effects, and social influence processes as well. In the final analysis, chapters were grouped together in terms of the primary focus of the research.

A secondary consideration when selecting areas to cover in this volume was to include chapters on areas in which we would like to encourage more scholarship in communication and social cognition. Thus, within each part we include chapters on research areas that we feel deserve more attention from scholars in the next 20 years. Specifically, we highlight arguments, family communication, comprehension, and the importance of understanding the effects of specific emotions on persuasion processes as areas of communication research that are poised to take off in the near future.

PART I: MESSAGE PRODUCTION

The first set of chapters focuses on the role of social cognition in message production. Message production research, at the most general level, is research that attempts to explain the mental process that result in communicative behavior. Message design has become a very active area in communication research with a special issue of Communication Theory (Wilson, Greene, & Dillard, 2000), countless research articles, and a book (Greene, 1997) devoted to the topic. We lead this section with Greene and Graves’s chapter (chap. 2), which provides a general theoretical overview of developments in cognitive models of message production processes. In reviewing the literature, they answer the following questions about theoretical work on message production: What is the theory about? What theoretical terms are invoked? What methods and data are brought to bear? Thus, this first chapter offers an overview of the contribution of social cognition theory to message production.

Planning is the mental processes by which goals are put into communication action. In chapter 3, Berger examines planning research with an emphasis on message production. His chapter draws on a wide variety of research including artificial intelligence, cognitive science, communication, linguistics, and philosophy to demonstrate the importance of plans in explaining discourse comprehension and message production.

In chapter 4, Wilson and Feng trace how interaction goals have been conceptualized in theories of message production. Four theories are comprehensively examined: Brown and Levinson’s (1978) politeness theory; O’Keefe’s (1988) goal complexity–behavioral complexity account; Dillard’s (2004) goals-plans-action (GPA) model; and Wilson, Aleman, and Leatham’s (1998) revised analysis of face threats and facework. All four theories employ a goal pursuit metaphor and view message production as a process of reconciling multiple goals, but differ in their characterization of goals and in terms of how multiple goals are managed.

The final chapter in the part on message production is written by Hample (chap. 5) on argumentation. By advancing claims that other people may or do not accept, a person advancing an argument demonstrates two clear features of argumentation: Argumentation is an activity in which humans engage and argumentation functions to create new meanings because the goal of an argument is to change how someone sees or understands the world. Starting with this basic observation, Hample convincingly defends his central thesis that most message production scholarship is about arguing and he integrates argument-specific research into the message production literature.

PART II: INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION

The second part of the book delves more deeply into social cognition in interpersonal contexts such as close relationships, family, and groups. Solomon and Thesis (chap. 6) lead off this section with an examination of current research on the forms of social cognition models of close relationships. This chapter also highlights the processes by which conclusions about relationships are extracted from conversation and the research on the cognitive antecedents and consequences of communication in close relationships.

Manusov (chap. 7) takes on the challenging job of summarizing the wide body of work on attributions in interpersonal interaction and relationships. She describes how attribution principles are a fundamental part of everyday sense making and our interactions with others. The attribution chapter focuses on findings relevant to social interaction and examines the use of attribution models to understand social meaning making as well as communication effects and outcomes of attribution processes.

In chapter 8, Roloff and Van Swol focus on social cognition in negotiation and group decision making with a specific emphasis on shared cognitions. In their review of the literature, the authors demonstrate how the success of group decision-making and negotiation processes depends on the ability of individuals to generate and accurately interpret messages that describe and forward their interests. Moreover, they suggest that a key “function of groups is to develop a shared reality among the members. Having shared cognition in the group allows for coordination of movement, facilitates communication and consensus, and promotes the maintenance of the group” (p. xxx). Thus, this chapter demonstrates key ways in which shared cognitions affect outcomes of group decision making and negotiation processes.

In chapter 9 on family communication research, Koerner simultaneously illustrates how social cognition has not been an important theoretical perspective in this area and also provides a compelling argument for why more work should be done. He examines some of the key social cognition work that is emerging from the family literature and discusses the difficult methodological issues that arise when one wants to study social cognition within families.

Finally, chapter 10 focuses on interpersonal communication under the influence of alcohol. Lannutti and Monahan note that most major theories that examine the influence of alcohol on social interaction assume alcohol affects social behavior via cognitive impairment. This chapter traces both the pharmacological effects and the expectancy effects of alcohol consumption on social perception and communication and examines the effects of alcohol on such interpersonal behaviors as verbal aggression, compliance gaining, and communication anxiety.

PART III: MASS MEDIA

In many ways, media scholars were slow to understand the utility of social cognitive approaches for advancing our understanding of the media, which may explain why there was only one chapter on the media in Berger and Roloff’s (1982) volume. As the label media effects would suggest, the research tradition that characterized early research on the media focused on the consequences of media use and tended to ignore the mechanisms underlying these consequences. As a result, cognitive mechanisms were ignored. Unfortunately, the uses and gratification perspective spent an inordinate amount of research focusing on people’s motivations for media use instead of moving to the next generation of research, which would have focused on the cognitive consequences of the functions that media use served for individuals (Morley, 1992). However, the 1980s saw an explosion of research utilizing social cognitive approaches to understand the media. The first chapter in the part on media is an analysis of current cultivation research that focuses on the cognitive processes that mediate the relation between television viewing and judgment. Consequently, Shrum (chap. 11) examines what he refers to as the weighing and balancing (Shapiro & Lang, 1991) and the accessibility models (Shrum, 2002) and demonstrates how these models each account for the information processing stages of cultivation (i.e., encoding, storage, retrieval, judgment). Importantly, Shrum extends the present work with cultivation theory, which focuses on offline cognitive processing to consider the importance of online processing when one is examining how media can change existing attitudes and beliefs.

Racism is a problem that continues to confront this country as events that occurred during Hurricane Katrina highlighted in 2005. What role do the media play in reinforcing or promoting racism? In chapter 12, Oliver, Ramasubramanian, and Kim examine research that demonstrates how media and racism interact and the mechanisms that explain how media creates and perpetuates stereotypes and racism. In their chapter, such social cognition processes as cultivation, exemplification, priming, selective attention, and selective recall are explored as they relate to racism. In addition, Oliver and her colleagues note that research on media and racism needs to take into account recent advances in our understanding of racism, including the important work that is going on regarding implicit racism (Devine, 1989; Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997; Fazio & Towles-Schwen, 1999).

In chapter 13, Eveland and Seo examine social cognitive processes that help explain how individuals process news and political communication. They focus on cognitive processing of and learning from media, the influence of news on perceptions of opinion climates, agenda setting, media priming, framing effects, and the role of expertise or sophistication as moderator of many of these effects. Methodologically, they highlight some of the changes that have occurred in survey methodologies that allow researchers to test social cognitive explanations of news via surveys, but they also note the need for more development in this area.

Finally, in the last chapter explicitly on media, Roskos-Ewoldsen, Roskos-Ewoldsen, Yang, and Lee (chap. 14) look at how people comprehend media stories. Despite numerous critiques of media scholarship because it seems to assume a perfect audience that interprets the media stimuli presented by experimenters in an identical manner (Hall, 1980/2001, 1994; Morley, 1992, 1980/1999), Roskos-Ewoldsen and colleagues note that little research has actually focused on how audiences understand media messages. As they note in their chapter, extensive research and theorizing has been conducted on text comprehension, but not much is known about how well theories of text comprehension will apply to visual media. Research in this area is complex and requires a number of different methodologies, which they highlight in this chapter.

PART IV: SOCIAL INFLUENCE

The final part of this book is comprised of four chapters on the role of social cognition in social influence or persuasive communication. Social influence, as with message design, is an area of the discipline that has embraced social cognition theories. Arpan, Rhodes, and Roskos-Ewoldsen (chap. 15) lead this part with an up-to-date analysis of attitude accessibility research. They define attitude accessibility as “the ease with which an attitude is activated from memory” (p. xxx). The chapter demonstrates how accessible attitudes are more resistant to counterpersuasion ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• 1. CELEBRATING SOCIAL COGNITION AND COMMUNICATION
• I. MESSAGE PRODUCTION
• II. INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION
• III. MASS MEDIA
• IV. SOCIAL INFLUENCE