Two studies examined the effects of offender blameworthiness, consequence severity, and offender gender on written accounts provided after a hypothetical predicament. Participants imagined themselves as the offending party in a predicament and provided written accounts after their victims' reproach. Accounts were coded using Schonbach's (1980) account taxonomy. Study 1 results showed that although concessionary strategies were the most prevalent overall, they were more prevalent for more blameworthy offenses than less blameworthy offenses. Women's accounts were more complex than men's, especially for more blameworthy offenses. In Study 2, in which 3 levels of blameworthiness were used, offenders proffered significantly more concessions after negligent acts than after either accidental or intentional acts, producing a curvilinear pattern. Again, accounts of men and women differed, with men proffering fewer and less complex concessions and more lies than did women. Deviations from politeness theory predictions are explained by reference to face-saving tensions inherent in social predicaments, tensions absent in less problematic social encounters."For the wages of sin is death." (Romans 6:23) Portions of the research reported here were presented at the 1990 Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago. This research was supported by a Grant-in-Aid of Research from the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota to Marti Hope Gonzales.We are grateful to Connie Lawrence, Jay Sieler, and Jordan Moe for their assistance in data collection and to Connie Lawrence for her voluminous typewritten transcriptions of participants' written accounts. We are also indebted to three anonymous reviewers whose valuable comments and suggestions are reflected in this article.
Examined the effects of offender sex, offender status, and consequence severity on accounts following an embarrassing predicament. Subjects were induced to believe they had committed a gaffe with either relatively mild or severe consequences for a confederate/victim of either higher or lower status than they, and their verbal and nonverbal behaviors captured on videotape served as the source of dependent variable measures. Verbal accounts were coded using Schonbach's (1980) account taxonomy. Nonverbal behaviors were also coded, as were measures of subjects' verbal and behavioral helping. Results showed a main effect for sex on account length (p < .001), number of concessionary elements (p < .001), and verbal helping scores (p = .001). Mitigating accounts were proffered more than aggravating accounts. Two-way interactions among sex, status, account type, and severity also were obtained.Social interactions do not always proceed smoothly. More often than we would like to think, we say or do something we and/or others wish we had not said or done, or fail to say or do something we and/or others wish we had, that is, when norms or role-based expectations are violated or when untoward acts are intentionally or unintentionally committed. Because such disruptions in otherwise fluid social encounters occur frequently, they have received a great deal of attention from microsociologists, psychologists, and sociolinguists alike (e.g.,
This study examined the effects of offender blameworthiness and offender accounts on victims' rejoinders. Participants imagined themselves victims of another's offense, provided written rejoinders to offenders' accounts, and rated the interpersonal consequences of the predicament. Offenders' blameworthiness and the accounts they proffered independently influenced both what victims chose to say and how they chose to say it; in response to escalating blameworthiness and increasingly contentious accounts, victims' rejoinders grew more negative in substance and communicative style. Victims' subjective assessments of the inter-personal consequences of predicaments were jointly influenced by offenders' blameworthiness and their accounts; account mitigated negative assessments following accidental and negligent offenses but not following intentional offenses. Results provide a tentative framework for understanding interpersonal conflict resulting from the face threat inherent both in offenders' trans-gressions and in their explanations for them.
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