SOCIAL P MODELS OF INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION …

1 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF INTERPERSONALCOMMUNICATIONR obert M. KraussDepartment of PsychologySchermerhorn HallColumbia UniversityNew York, NY 10027(212) R. FussellDepartment of PsychologyMagruder HallMississippi State Box 6161 Mississippi State, MS 39762(601) of INTERPERSONAL Communicationpage 2 Running Head: MODELS OF COMMUNICATIONTo appear in Higgins & A. Kruglanski (Eds.), SOCIAL Psychology:Handbook of Basic Principles. New York: Guilford of INTERPERSONAL Communicationpage 3 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF INTERPERSONALCOMMUNICATION Robert M.

2 Krauss and Susan R. FussellColumbia university and Mississippi State University1. COMMUNICATION and SOCIAL PsychologySocial psychology traditionally has been defined as the study of theways in which people affect, and are affected by, Communicationis one of the primary means by which people affect one another, and, inlight of this, one might expect the study of COMMUNICATION to be a coretopic of SOCIAL psychology, but historically that has not been the doubt there are many reasons. Among them is the fact thatcommunication is a complex and multidisciplinary concept, and, across theseveral disciplines that use the term, there is no consensus on exactly howit should be defined.

3 It is an important theoretical construct in suchotherwise dissimilar fields as cell biology, computer science, ethology,linguistics, electrical engineering, sociology, anthropology, genetics,philosophy, semiotics, and literary theory. And although there is a core ofmeaning common to the way the term is used in these disciplines, theparticularities differ enormously. What cell biologists call communicationbears little resemblance to what anthropologists study under the samerubric. A concept used in so many different ways runs the risk ofbecoming an amorphous catch-all term lacking precise meaning, and thatalready may have happened to COMMUNICATION .

4 As the sociologist ThomasModels of INTERPERSONAL Communicationpage 4 Luckmann has observed, " COMMUNICATION has come to mean all things toall men" (Luckmann, 1993, p. 68).Despite this, for SOCIAL psychologists COMMUNICATION (or someequivalent notion) remains an indispensable concept. It's difficult toimagine serious discussions of such topics as SOCIAL influence, small groupinteraction, SOCIAL perception, attitude change, or INTERPERSONAL relationsthat ignore the role COMMUNICATION plays. Yet such discussions typicallypay little attention to the specific mechanisms by means of which theprocess instructive parallel can be drawn between the way contemporarysocial psychologists think about COMMUNICATION and the way an earliergeneration of SOCIAL psychologists thought about cognition.

5 It was notunusual in the late 1970s, when SOCIAL cognition was beginning to emergeas an important theoretical focus, for SOCIAL psychologists of an earliergeneration to observe that SOCIAL psychology had always been cognitive inits orientation, so that a focus on SOCIAL cognition was really nothing was some truth to this claim. Even in the hey-day of Behaviorism, SOCIAL psychologists really never accepted the doctrine that all behavior, SOCIAL and otherwise, could be explained without invoking whatBehaviorists disparagingly termed "mentalistic" concepts (Deutsch &Krauss, 1965).

6 Indeed, the concepts that defined the field (attitude, belief,expectation, value, impressions, etc.) were cognitive by their very point is well taken as far as it goes, but it fails to acknowledge thedifferences between the implicitly cognitive outlook of the earlier socialpsychology and the study of SOCIAL cognition. In the former, it wasassumed that cognition underpinned virtually all of the processes ability to think, perceive, remember, categorize and so forth wereModels of INTERPERSONAL Communicationpage 5assumed to be capacities of the normal person, and little attention was paidto the specific details of how these mental operations were order for messages to change attitudes, people must be able tounderstand them, remember them, think about them, etc.

7 It was assumedthat people could and would do these things; exactly how was not thoughtto be of great contrast, underlying the study of SOCIAL cognition (as that term hascome to be understood) is the assumption that the particular mechanismsby which cognition is accomplished are themselves important determinantsof the outcome of the process. For example, particularities of the structureof human memory, and of the processes of encoding and retrieval, canaffect what will or will not be recalled. One consequence of this differencein emphasis can be seen in an example.

8 In the earlier SOCIAL psychology,negative stereotypes of disadvantaged minorities were understood asinstances of motivated perceptual distortion deriving from majority groupmembers needs, interests and goals (Allport, 1954). More recently,however, it has been shown that such stereotypes can arise simply from theway people process information about others, and that invidious motivesor conflict are unnecessary for their development (Andersen, Klatsky, &Murray, 1990; Hamilton & Sherman, 1989). While motivation and conflictprobably do often play a role in the development of pejorative groupstereotypes, apparently it is not a necessary condition for their emergence.

9 (For a historical review of research in this area, see Rothbart & Lewis, 1994.)In much the same way, contemporary SOCIAL psychologistsacknowledge that COMMUNICATION mediates much SOCIAL behavior, but seemwilling to assume that it gets accomplished, and display little interest inhow it occurs. Their focus is on content, not process. As a result, they mayModels of INTERPERSONAL Communicationpage 6fail to appreciate how the COMMUNICATION situation their experimentrepresents affects the behavior they observe. Recent work by Schwarz,Strack and their colleagues illustrates some consequences of this oversight(Bless, Strack, & Schwarz, 1993; Schwarz, Strack, Hilton, & Naderer, 1991b;Strack & Schwarz, 1993; Strack, Schwarz, & W nke, 1991).

10 For example,Strack et al. (1991) elicited subjects responses to two similar items: (1)"How happy are you with your life as a whole?" and "How satisfied areyou with your life as a whole?" For one group of subjects, the twoquestions were asked in different, unrelated questionnaires; for the othergroup, the questions were asked in the same questionnaire, set off from theother items in a box labeled "Here are some questions about your life."Other things being equal, one would expect responses to the twoitems to be highly correlated.