The Cross-Situational Consistency of Communicative Behaviors

Abstract

Cappella for their ideas and criticisms.Personality traits are widely employed as antecedent variables in the explanation of communicative behaviors. This study explored the legitimacy of the use of traits by focusing on the conceptual and empirical justification for one assumption of the trait approach: "cross-situational consistency. " This assumption was not supported for the traits of "reticence" or 'predisposition toward verbal behavior." Evidence also raised questions concerning the general validity of this assumption for other, familiar trait variables. Alternative conceptualizations of the trait/behavior relationship were reviewed and briefly critiqued.The purported link between personality and communication behaviors has been the focus of increasing amounts of empirical investigation in the field of communication. Personality variables such as Machiavellianism, selfconcept, introversion, anomie, dogmatism, and anxiety have all been considered as antecedents of an array of communicative acts. Most recently communication scholars have developed a set of personality variables uniquely derived from within our field. Exemplifying this trend are at

Multiple-Act Criteria in the Validation of Communication Traits: What Do We Gain and What Do We Lose?

“…These included measures of self-esteem (Rosenberg, 1965), verbal reticence (Lustig, 1974(Lustig, ,1977, extroversion (Eysenck, 1958), trait anxiety (Spielberger, Gorsuch, & Lushene, 1969): and predisposition toward verbal behavior (Mortensen et al, 1977). The conceptual relevance of these constructs to the generalized predisposition has been established by Mortensen, Arntson, and Lustig (1977), McCroskey (1977McCroskey ( , 1978, Burgoon and Burgoon (1974), and Hewes and Haight (1979). Correlational data supplied by Daly (1978aDaly ( , 1978b) strongly suggest the empirical comparability of many highly similar measures (including the verbal reticence scale used here), while data obtained by Hewes et al (1976) indicate the empirical similarity of the scales employed here.1°…”

“…A test of equality between these two figures resulted in a rejection of the null hypothesis @<.03, power -.99 for a= .05 and medium effects size). Certainly these comparisons of the magnitudes of r(tb,) and P(bij) suggest the comparability of Daly's behavioral indices with those found in Hewes and Haight (1979). The higher internal consistency for the self-reports in our data is a desirable property from the standpoint of traditional trait theories (Cattell, 1966;Mischel, 1968).…”

“…The source of the traidself-report correlations has been described above. Traidbehavior correlations for the same set of traits and behavioral indices from a comparable sample are reported by Hewes and Haight (1979). In every instance, correlations with behavioral criteria were lower than their counterparts based on self-reports (See Table 1).…”

Viewing television news

“…The idea of cross-situational consistency, which Bern and Allen (1974) argue is synonymous with the concept of personality, establishes a criterion for explaining phe-71 CSMC nomena according to personality characteristics. But findings show that persons are not consistent across various social situations with regard to traits and behavior (Hewes & Haight, 1979). The transactional approach assumes that human behavior is explained by an interaction of person, media, and socialenvironmental variables, and the general social-psychological literature shows personby-situation interactions to be more successful in explaining human behavior than individual or situational variables alone (Bowers, 1973;Endler & Hunt, 1976).…”

“…Associating similarity in media-use behavior in parallel situations, or "longitudinal" consistency, with cross-situational consistency, or personality consistency (Hewes & Haight, 1979) may have led to misconstruing how regularly people behave in television news viewing. The idea of cross-situational consistency, which Bern and Allen (1974) argue is synonymous with the concept of personality, establishes a criterion for explaining phe-71 CSMC nomena according to personality characteristics.…”