Ignoring Respect: The Effects of Threat to Face on Replies and the Ensuing Questions During Broadcast Political Interviews in Japan

Abstract

This article examines the effect of threat to face to both interviewers and interviewees during live televised interview programs in Japan, where the concept of “face” is of extreme importance in maintaining interpersonal relationships. Based on 2,422 questions identified during 120 interviews broadcast over a period of 12 months on four television programs, the goal is twofold: First, to assess the extent to which questions that contain a certain level of threat to face affect the interviewees’ replies, and second, to measure the extent to which interviewees’ replies affect the interviewers’ subsequent questions. The findings indicate that questions containing a higher degree of threat to the interviewers’ face resulted in less clear and comprehensible replies. Furthermore, equivocal responses to questions increased the chance of a follow-up question being more face-threatening, suggesting that interviewers who are unsatisfied with the replies of their interviewees manifest their displeasure with tougher follow-up questions.

Reconstructing the Political Future of Armenia: Overcoming Contemporary Turbulence Through Role Models

“…The harsh realities of fast-paced changes in conceivably all domains of human activity point in the direction of psychosocial transformations as well. For example, O. Feldman and S. Zmerli argue that media are capable of framing specific aspects of perceived reality as they choose and freely exclude what to report on, including genderbiased news and femininity (Feldman and Zmerli 2019;Feldman and Kinoshita 2019).…”

La entrevista política ante el sesgo audiovisual. El caso de Los desayunos de TVE (2018)

“…Partisan bias and threats against the interviewee are present in various cultures (Gnisci et al, 2013). Even in a context as different from Western cultures as Japan, a study revealed that interviewers' questions affected the interviewees' answers, which in turn altered the journalists' subsequent questions (Feldman & Kinoshita, 2019). In particular, the way that interviewers manage the threat is not reflected in the content of the questions but in the way the questions are asked (Feldman & Kinoshita, 2019).…”

“…The next variable used in the study, intensity of questions (Q(n)I), has been determined on the basis of studies by Feldman & Kinoshita (2019) in the field of linguistic research. Our analysis of the interviewees' answers was based on content and context, two of the dimensions considered in equivocation theory (Bavelas et al, 1990), taking into account the modifications suggested in subsequent studies (Feldman et al, 2016).…”