Thefundamental components of interpersonal transactions at the nonverbal level ofen include the cognitively held intention of one person to increase or decrease affiliation with his or her partner, the encoding of this intention into behavioral displays, and the decoding of the behavioral displays by the other Nonverbal encoding of relational information may be conducted at less than conscious levels of infirmation processing although intentions may be held consciously. A study was conducted in which naive confea'erates were induced to either increase or decrease their displays of likingfir their partner. It was found that confhates' intentions to show increased or decreased liking toward their partners m e positively correlated with the partners'likingfor the confederate. However, less than one quarter of the confederates could demonstrate an accurate conscious awareness of the behaviors they used and how they used them. Of this small number, those who weregiven the conscious intention of showing decreased liking demonstrated the most conscious awareness of their nonverbal behaviors. w hen meeting face to face, strangers or acquaintances are faced with the task of managing interpersonal relationships under conditions of uncertainty. Social conventions typically inhibit open and explicit talk about the immediate relationship (Goffman, 1967;Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). Under these constraints, relationships tend to develop through the subtle and rapid exchange of interpersonal messages carried through nonverbal channels (Burgoon, Buller, Hale, & deTurck, 1984;Cappella, 1984;Patterson, 1983). Assuming that the relational transaction process requires some strategic direction, and is implicit as well as rapid, this article addresses the question of whether nonverbal negotiations of relationships are conducted consciously or not.An experiment was conducted that tested whether individuals with conscious intentions to show liking or disliking during initial interactions were consciously aware of their choice and execution of nonverbal behaviors.
We contend that communication episodes tend to focus interactants'attention on one or the other of two relational judgments: dominance or affiliation. Further, when one judgment is relatively more salient, individuals will use the salient judgment as the basisfor infm'ng other aspects of the relationship. To test that notion, a judgment study was conducted in which participants viewed a set of influence messages that varied in degree of dominance and explicitness. The influence context was chosen because it naturally highlighted dominance. After viewing the messages, participants provided ratings ofdominance, explicitness, and two aspects of affiliation: liking and involvement. When the resulting data were submitted to a structural equation analysis, it wasfound that judgments of liking depended on judgments of explicitness and dominance. Judgments of involvement depended on judgments of liking and dominance. Bothfindings support the claim that one relational judgment may provide the basis for another.henever two persons interact with one another they make judgments about the nature of their relationship on the basis of the W messages that they exchange. In large measure, those judgments are estimates of the relative dominance and affiliation of the two individuals. Attention to the content of those judgments reveals the impetus for a relational inference process; individuals are motivated to predict and understand the behavior of others because they are dependent upon them for the rewards that social actors desire.Illumination of the process by which those judgments occur has been, and will continue to be, a fundamental challenge for communication James Price Dillard is a professor of communication arts at the University of WisconsinMadison. Mark T. Palmer is an assistant professor of communication arts at Northwestern University. Terry A. Kinney is a doctoral candidate in communication arts at the University of Winsconsin-Madison,We are grateful to Kyle Tusing for his assistance with stimulus development and data collection and to Mike Cruz for his comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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