Some interpersonal messages are reported to be remembered for a long time and to haoe a profound influence on a person's life.During the course of a single day, hundreds of verbal messages are directed to us in face-to-face encounters for evaluation and response; during one's lifetime the quantity of interpersonal messages processed must be staggering. Most of these messages have a relatively short life; they are processed, responded to, and forgotten. Yet, there seem to be a few verbal messages which may be remembered for extremely long periods of time and which people perceive as a major influence on the course of their lives.One such message for naval officer and eventual President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, was later used as the title for his autobiography, Why Not the Best? (6, preface). During an interview with Admiral Rickover for a position in the nuclear submarine program, Rickover asked Carter if he did his best while at the Naval Academy. After Carter admitted that he did not always do his best, Rickover asked, "Why not?" According to Carter, this was a question he was "never able to forget" and became a rule for him to live by. Another example involves noted therapist Carl Rogers, who recounted a memorable and influential episode which took place while he was a student discussing the learning and use of facts with a professor of agronomy. The professor reportedly said, "Don't be a damned ammunition wagon; be a rifle" (27, chapter 1).

Even though most of us lie from time to time, it is really quite surprising how little is known about such behaviors. Through controlled observation and laboratory testing, this study attempted to determine what verbal and nonverbal behaviors were characteristic of intentionally deceptive communicators. Seventy-six videotaped interviews provided a data base for the analysis of 32 dependent measures. In addition to analyses of specific behavioral differences between deceivers and nondeceivers, the authors provide a conceptual framework for the study of deception-predicting that deceivers will exhibit significantly more uncertainty, vagueness, nervousness, reticence, dependence, and unpleasantness than nondeceivers.Few of us can escape the fact that lying has played an important role in the development, maintenance, and the termination of human relationships. Widespread lip service is given to the platitudes "honesty is the best policy" and "people should tell it like it is." To lie is to be labeled "undermining," "malicious," or ''morally reprehensible." Persons from all walks of life extol the virtues of telling the truth while decrying any act of deception. Well-intended moralisms all.Despite these fervent admonitions, duplicity seems to be a constituent of nearly everyone's communicative repertoire. The rudiments of lying are often learned at an early age, by observing the communicative strategies employed by parents and peers and by undergoing punishments for being truthful. From introspection alone, it seems clear that lying is an adaptive behavior first practiced in situations where it is a harbinger of success or, at least, promises to help us avoid negative sanctions.Thereafter, the selective force working for the continuation and escalation of lying is its efficiency in solving interpersonal or other problems. The fact th.at deception, as a communicative strategy, is often rewarded causes us t o resort frequently to varying degrees of fabrication to suit our personal, pragmatic purposes. Cavil though we will at the fly-by-night salesman, lying works. In addition to rhetorical profit, Wolk and Henley (1970) see psychological dividends to be the due of the deceptive communicator:The sheer prevalence of lying does mean that a climate of deceit is the psychological weather of our age and that the person who can tolerate this climate with a minimum of stressful guilt will reap psychological benefits from the acceptance of the realities. . . . We believe that this civilization's climate of deceit .makes lies not only unavoidable, but indispensible. They actually help people to preserve their emotional equilibrium. (p. 7)In short, lying is publicly condemned, yet privately practiced by a significant proportion of the population; it is a phenomenon heavily laden with various stigmata, yet a device that can be rhetorically effective; it is a ubiquitous entity which seems antithetical to the bywords of this era-"credibility" and "trust."With these conflicting thoughts in mind, we undertook a diagnosis of deceptive ...

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They may be at least as good to receive as to give and they show regular patterns in their semantic formulations, their placement in the flow of conversation, and the people who exchange them.One approach to studying human communication is to determine the nature and functions of individual speech acts (26). Descriptions of these segmented parts of talk can provide insight into how communication, in general, works. In addition, an understanding of when and why particular speech acts are used can help explicate the rules by which competent interaction proceeds.This article describes and analyzes the nature of compliments that people recalled as having been recently given or received. The compliment is a speech act worthy of study because it is ubiquitous, valued, and problematic. Our intuition, as well as the ease with which our respondents were able to report recently given and received compliments, leads US to believe that compliments are a common feature of everyday discourse. That compliments are valued seems unquestionable; some people believe compliments are as critical to social success as oxygen is to breathing. Dale Carnegie (5) Iauded compliments for their usefulness in getting people to do things for you, maintaining a happy marriage, and making people instantly like you. One empirical study found that women who used compliments in their conversations with men were rated significantly higher in social skills than those who did not (9).

The private expressions and gestures shared by a couple can help define the norm8 of their relationship and promote its cohe8iveneas.In an intimate relationship between two persons, certain words, phrases, and gestures may come to carry unique meanings only in the context of that relationship. By studying these personal idioms we hoped to learn more about the structure of the world of intimate talk, which remains largely unexplored by scholars.Communication which shows special adaptations to the other (1,6, 12, 14) is more likely to occur in intimate than in non-intimate relationships. Such communication reveals a mixture of private talk (understood only by the intimates) and public talk (used by others in similar relationships) (13). A relationship's "peculiar color of intimacy" emerges mostly from private idiomatic talk; its "affective structure" may emerge from what each of the two participants shows only to the one other person and to nobody else (13, p. 315). Theoretically, then, we should find more idiosyncratic messages in intimate relationships.Perceptions of uniqueness in communication behavior have been found to be associated with perceived closeness of the relationship (10). In a survey of over lo00 people ranging in age from 12 to 90 (7, one factor which was central to perceptions of communication behavior associated with various degrees of intimacy-and one which increased as the described relationship became more intimate-was called "personalized communication." This included such behaviors as telling another person things not told to most people (feelings, secrets, personal things); relying on a greater variety of channels for sending and receiving messages (including emotion-laden nonverbal channels); and using messages adapted to the interacting pair only.