Showing papers in "Communication Theory in 1996"

Interpersonal Deception Theory

Abstract: Interpersonal deception theory (IDT) represents a merger of interpersonal communication and deception principles designed to better account for deception in interactive contexts. At the same time, it bas the potential to enlighten theories related to (a) credibility and truthful communication and (b) interpersonal communication. Presented here are key definitions, assumptions related to the critical attributes and key features of interpersonal communication and deception, and 18 general propositions from which specific testable hypotheses can be derived. Research findings relevant to the propositions are also summarized.

The Communicational Basis of Organization: Between the Conversation and the Text

Abstract: Recent work in the sociology of scientific knowledge leads us to believe that organization exists in the interpretive processes of its members. A theory of communication is presented which views the communicational process as a double translation, from text to conversation and conversation into text. Using this theory as a basis, a conception of complex and extended forms of organization is developed which demonstrates that the text-conversation cycle underlies a complex process of networking out of which the identity of the organization emerges, and social structuring occurs, resulting in the division of labor and coordination. Implications of the theory are briefly considered for research.

Connective and Communal Public Goods in Interactive Communication Systems

Abstract: This paper extends theories of public goods to interactive communication systems. Two key public communication goods are identified. Connectivity provides point-to-point communication, and communality links members through commonly held information, such as that often found in databases. These extensions are important, we argue, because communication public goods operate differently from traditional material public goods. These differences have important implications for costs, benefits, and the realization of a critical mass of users that is necessary for realization of the good. We also explore multifunctional goods that combine various features and hybrid goods that link private goods to public ones. We examine the applicability of two key assumptions of public goods theory to interactive communication systems. First, jointness of supply specifies that consumption of a public good does not diminish its availability to others. Second, impossibility of exclusion stipulates that all members of the public have access to the good. We conclude with suggestions for further theoretical development.

Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An “Other” View

Abstract: Postcolonial theory and criticism provide rhetorical studies with an important critical and political perspective with which to engage in issues of neocolonialism and racism. This essay offers an overview of postcolonial theory and criticism, and delineates some of the implications of a postcolonial perspective for rhetorical studies by demonstrating how a postcolonial rhetorical approach pushes the traditional frontiers of the discipline in a manner that enables racially and culturally marginalized perspectives on rhetoric to emerge.

Testing Interpersonal Deception Theory: The Language of Interpersonal Deception

Abstract: An analysis of verbal behavior was undertaken to test principles of interpersonal deception theory (IDT). It was predicted that language choice in deceptive messages would reflect strategic attempts to manage information through nonimmediate language. This linguistic profile, though, was expected to be altered in response to preinteractional factors - relational and behavioral familiarity - and interactional factors - form of deception and receiver suspicion. Results from two investigations are reported: a secondary analysis on interactions in an earlier study (Burgoon, Buller, Dillman, & Walther, 1995) and analysis of a primary experiment employing a 2 (relationship) × 2 (receiver expertise) × 2 (receiver suspicion) × 2 (truth/deception) within-subjects factorial design. As expected, senders displayed greater verbal nonimmediacy when deceiving. Expertise had a greater effect on linguistic behavior than a prior relationship with the receiver, with senders using more verbal nonimmediacy with novice receivers. Senders were more verbally nonimmediate when equivocating. Suspicion produced a mixed pattern of linguistic cues. The possibility that changes produced by preinteraction and interactional factors were strategic attempts to bolster credibility is discussed.

Abduction: A Theory of Visual Interpretation

Abstract: Peirce's notion of abductive reasoning provides a theoretical framework in which to analyze visual interpretation, that is, how viewers understand a visual and interpret its meaning. This paper demonstrates that a different kind of interpretive logic operates for visual communication processes than for language-based communication processes, and this logic is best articulated in the semiotic literature where the notion of interpretation is more carefully conceptualized.

Testing Interpersonal Deception Theory: Effects of Suspicion on Communication Behaviors and Perceptions

Abstract: One major thrust of interpersonal deception theory (IDT) is elevating receivers of deception to a central role and acknowledging the important influence that their suspicion has on their own and senders' behaviors. The current investigation considers: (a) what sender behaviors are associated with receiver suspicion, (b) bow suspicion is displayed overtly by receivers, (c) whether senders recognize suspicion when present, and (d) how suspicion influences sender behavior. Results are reported from an experiment in which interviewees gave varying forms of deceptive answers to interviewers who were or were not induced to be suspicious. Results confirmed that several sender behaviors were associated with receiver suspicion, that receiver suspicion was manifested nonverbally, that deceivers interacting with novice receivers sensed the suspicion, and suspicion altered sender nonverbal displays. However, suspicion often interacted with other communicator factors and deception type to produce complex behavioral patterns. Sender and receiver communication style also were highly correlated, regardless of suspicion level, indicating likely mutual influence. Results underscore the importance of taking communicative features into account and the unlikely prospects of uncovering a generic receiver suspicion display or a suspicion-induced deceiver display that is invariant across relationships and communication contexts.

Modernization, Marginalization, and Emancipation: Toward a Normative Model of Journalism and National Development

Abstract: The idea of “development journalism,” central to many discussions of mass communication and development in the Third World, needs to be reconceptualized because deliberations about its validity and usefulness have been bogged down in arguments structured by Western notions of press freedom. The debate has diverted attention from important questions about how journalism can contribute to participatory democracy, security, peace, and other humanistic values. This article argues that social transformations are deeply rooted in changing ideas and practices related to space and time. Thus, as background for reconceptualizing development journalism, the expectations and actual impacts of the dominant models of mass communication and development are analyzed, with particular attention to the relationships among mass communication, space, and time. Then the concept of emancipation is explicated and a normative model for “emancipatory journalism” is outlined. The model specifies an activist role within “new social movements” for journalism and journalists in the process of national development. The relationship between emancipatory journalism and social change is considered in the final section.

The Hierarchy Principle in Strategic Communication

Abstract: The hierarchy principle suggests that when individuals fail to reach social goals and they continue to pursue them, their first tendency is to alter lower level elements of message plan hierarchies concerned with speech rate and vocal intensity rather than higher level elements related to the structure and sequencing of message content. This pattern of message plan alteration is predicated on the notion that higher level alterations are more demanding of scarce cognitive resources. This postulate was examined directly in two laboratory and two field experiments in which geographic direction givers were led to believe their directions had been misunderstood because of communication failures located at different levels in the message plan hierarchy. Consistent with the hierarchy principle and the effort postulate, direction givers required to make more abstract alterations to their directions (route changes) showed higher levels of cognitive load as indexed by speech onset latency than direction givers required to make lower level alterations (landmarks and speech rate). The effects of time constraints, preinteraction planning, and failure pervasiveness were also examined. Both laboratory and field experiments showed general support for the hierarchy principle's predictions. Implications of the hierarchy principle for the study of strategic communication are considered.

How Science is Subverted: Penology and Prison Inmates' Resistance

Abstract: The problem of violence within America's prison system is not only misunderstood in key respects by the penological science that seeks to know it; it is in significant respects an effect of penological science and the practices it generates in the course of having aligned itself with legal discourses of the political state. Our thesis, informed by concepts that are central to Michel Foucault's antiscience project, is that violence within America's prison system is best understood as an oppositional response to a penological science, which, organized as a set of discursive practices and deployed in an alliance with legal discourses of the political state, succeeds in knowing inmates only in restricted and ultimately self-defeating ways. Our thesis is neutral as to the truth or falsity of the specific knowledge claims of penology. Rather our focus is on the ways in which retrictedness and self-defeat are inherent in the very doing of penology and how, further, the purported successes of penology's discursively grounded knowledge claims, as well as the practices they engender, contribute to the (violent) undoing of those very same claims. We offer illustrative empirical support for our thesis by showing some discursive practices of penological science, how they are deployed specifically in the course of inscribing inmates as scientifically knowable objects, and how such tactics incite inmates to develop new identity resources, steeped in violence, which effectively subvert penology's claims to knowledge.

From Functionalism to Cultural Studies: Manifest Ruptures and Latent Continuities

Abstract: Functionalism practically disappeared as an explicit tradition in communications due to the radical theoretical realignments of the 1980s. Three criticisms proved decisive to this undoing; political conservatism; problems of logic, mainly tautology and an inappropriate appeal to teleological explanations; and a tendency to impose psychological and sociological analyses on specifically cultural materials. Formulated in reference to systemic Parsonian functionalism, which dominated the broader social sciences, these criticisms are relatively easy to reconcile within the contextual, actionist Mertonian tradition, which took root in the communications context, but only through a constructive dialogue with the cultural studies and cultural indicators approaches, both of which have spent the last decade investigating a traditionally functionalist concern – the hypothesis of cultural systems integration. If functionalism offers to this cross-fertilization a focus on the normative orders of society, the cultural indicators approach provides a rigorous methodology and cultural studies cautions a greater sensitivity to social hierarchies.

Sex Control Technology and Reproductive “Choice”: The Conflation of Technical and Political Argument in the New Science of Human Reproduction

Abstract: This essay analyzes the discourse surrounding one of the new reproductive technologies, sex “choice,” which allows prospective parents to control for male offspring through sperm separation technology. Topical analysis is used to make the case that the deployment of political claims within technical argument serves only to mystify audiences and obscure ideological motives. This analysis reveals the standards of appropriateness suited to judging both technical and public claims. Feminist critiques of reproductive technologies provide emancipatory criteria for judging new technologies. Both standards, those of appropriateness to a specific realm and those of emancipation, are necessary to judge the selection of “choice” as the descriptor of technologies that will most likely narrow women's choices as individuils and a group. The essay takes the position that making distinctions between the different spheres of argument is necessary for judging the appropriateness of standards proffered within each sphere. Neither standards appropriate to any individual sphere nor “yusion discourse,” which bridges spheres, should be confused with idealized and transcendent emancipatory criteria.

Empirical Diversity, Interdependence, and the Problem of Rhetorical Invention and Judgment: The Case of Wife Abuse Facts

Abstract: For nearly 20 years, Dr Murray Straus and his associates at the University of New Hampshire's Family Research Laboratory have debated critics about the facts of wife abuse and how best to attain them This debate occurs under circumstances of “empirical diversity” that involve researchers who investigate wife abuse with different methods and adduce a range of often seemingly incompatible facts Consequently, disputants confront a special pluralistic version of the ancient rhetorical problem of invention and judgment: How can one establish common grounds for creation and evaluation of arguments about facts in the presence of empirical diversity? This essay conducts a topical analysis of Straus's arguments, which reveals two distinct approaches to this problem One approach locates adjudicating standards in values and assumptions rooted deeply within Straus's preferred orientation toward the issues Arguments premised on that kind of standard polarize rhetorical judgment under empirically diverse circumstances The other approach locates standards in practical points of interdependence among disputants Arguments premised on the interdependence topos open possibilities for more constructive deliberation among those who argue for seemingly incompatible facts The essay shows that topical analysis of the “ksrats” of invention and judgment affords opportunities for practical intervention in controversies about science

Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory: Toward a Constructive Analysis of Scientific Rhetorics

Abstract: While rhetorical studies of science have made significant progress in mapping the discursive dynamics of the sciences, it has only begun to engage meaningfully the question of promoting alternative, constructive discourses of and about science in the postmodern polis. Characterizing science as a complex series of discursive practices, this essay highlights the inescapable symbiosis of technical and political ways of knowing, creating sites for rhetorical critics to offer advisory claims regarding more constructive, democratic public engagements with science in the postmodern age. A brief study of the 1989 cold fusion controversy illustrates this perspective.

Prying Open the Window of Opportunity: Some Rhetorical and Social Scientific Dynamics to Argumentation

Abstract: Social scientists' arguments integrate both rhetorical and scientific features. Our belief is that analysis of these integrated arguments offers an opportunity to distinguish between the peculiarly rhetorical and scientific components of social scientists' argumentative efforts to resolve problems of inquiry. Our analysis shows that rhetorical forms combine with special empirical contents in problem-solving arguments that aim ultimately to establish what we call reasoned facts about social phenomena under empirical investigation. We conclude that neither purely rhetorical nor purely scientific features of argument are sufficient to account for social scientists' efforts to induce acceptance of their claims as resolving problems of inquiry.

Reading DeMan Reading Rhetoric

Abstract: Paul de Man's conception of rhetoric is misguided. Based on his reading of Nietzsche, de Man argues that the historical and philosophical articulations of rhetoric suggest that persuasion exists as a derivative of trope. In this essay, I provide a rereading of Nietzsche's early conceptions of rhetoric that critiques de Man's separation of trope and persuasion. Through this rereading, I argue that Nietzsche's understanding of rhetoric parallels earlier historical articulations of rhetoric, which rely on a fusion of trope and persuasion as a means of the social production of knowledge. The essay concludes by arguing that Nietzsche's sense of perspectivism coincides with this social sense of rhetoric, and that de Man's separation of trope and persuasion becomes untenable when rhetoric is reconsidered within the thematic of Nietzsche's perspectivism.