Franklin J. Boster

The Impact of Group Size and Proportion of Shared Information on the Exchange and Integration of Information in Groups

Hidden profiles exist when individual group members hold all the information favoring one decision alternative but only a subset of the information favoring another alternative. Given a hidden profile, group members often fail to exchange information completely and consequently make poor decisions. Circumstances in which groups perform poorly are worrisome because groups frequently are asked to make decisions. Conditions that improve group performance on hidden profiles were sought. Group information sharing and decision-making effectiveness were found to be higher in small groups with a low percentage of shared information, and lower when groups either were large or shared a high percentage of information (N = 80 groups). Greater information sharing, however, did not correlate with longer discussions. The proportion of shared information affected bolstering and discounting of information. Qualitative observations of group behavior are presented, and the implications of the results for information sharing and decision making are discussed.

Development and Validation of Value-, Outcome-, and Impression-Relevant Involvement Scales

Despite scholarly consensus that there is more than one type of involvement, investigators have not developed measures that assess the various types across diverse contexts. The goal of this study was to develop and validate measures of value-, outcome-, and impression-relevant involvement. Items were developed for three social issues (abortion, death penalty, marijuana) and two consumer products (jeans, toothpaste). The results indicate that these items effectively distinguish the three types of involvement. In addition, evidence of construct validity was obtained. Specifically, impression-relevant involvement was associated with other-directedness, outcome-relevant involvement was more strongly associated with information seeking than either value- or impression-relevant involvement, and value-relevant involvement (but also outcome-relevant involvement) was related to attitude extremity.

The Roles of Obligation and Gratitude in Explaining the Effect of Favors on Compliance This paper is based on the first author's doctoral dissertation and was presented at the International Communication Association's 54th annual convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, May 2004.

Several studies suggest that providing a favor to a target before making a direct request for compliance is more effective than making a direct request alone. The most widely accepted explanation for this effect is that receiving favors causes beneficiaries to feel obligated to repay. Another potential explanation is that beneficiaries comply out of gratitude to the benefactor. Past conceptualizations frequently confound obligation and gratitude and no research tests these alternative explanations. We advance the study of reciprocal behavior by making conceptual distinctions between obligation and gratitude, and testing these two presumed mediating states in two experiments. Results demonstrate that obligation and gratitude can be empirically distinguished, supporting the gratitude explanation, but not the obligation explanation.

Individual differences and compliance gaining message selection: The effects of verbal aggressivencess, argumentativeness, dogmatism, and negativism

Recent work in the area of communication and individual differences has produced measures of two traits which promise to be important to the process of selecting compliance gaining messages. In the study reported in this paper the effects of these two traits, argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness, on compliance gaining message chokes were assessed, while controlling for the effects of two known predictors, negativism and dogmatism. The data indicate that the impact of these variables is situationally dependent. This finding is discussed in terms of recent hypotheses concerning the impact of trait by individual difference interactions on human communication behavior.

The impact of argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness on strategic diversity and persistence in compliance‐gaining behavior

This paper reports the results of a study investigating the effects of two communication‐relevant personality variables, verbal aggressiveness and argumentativeness, on two quantitative dimensions of compliance‐gaining message use, persistence and diversity. The investigation involved having 46 participants engage in a series of negotiations in which their compliance‐gaining behavior was measured. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that argumentativeness is positively related to strategic diversity. The results also indicate that verbal aggressiveness and argumentativeness interact to effect persistence.

The Relative Effectiveness of a Direct Request Message and a Pregiving Message on Friends and Strangers

This study examined the role of the norm of reciprocity in mediating the relative effect of compliance-gaining message type on compliance in interactions involving friends and strangers. Subjects received either a direct request to purchase raffle tickets or received the request after having a favor done for them by a confederate, a pregiving message. Results indicate that friends comply more with requests than strangers and that their compliance is constant across message types. Among strangers, the pregiving message produced more compliance than the direct request.

Some Effects of Video Streaming on Educational Achievement.

Although much contemporary thinking leads to the expectation that communication technology, such as video streaming, enhances educational performance on the average, a dearth of strong evidence consistent or inconsistent with this claim precludes a thoughtful evaluation of it. A series of experiments designed to examine this proposition contributes to filling this lacuna. Third- and eighth-grade students either received or did not receive exposure to one such application, unitedstreaming™, in either their science or social studies classes (or both). Results indicated that this video-streaming application resulted in higher mean examination performance in third-grade science, third-grade social studies, and eighth-grade social studies. No differences between those exposed to this communication technology and those not exposed to it emerged in the eighth-grade science experiment.

Dropping Out of High School: A Meta-Analysis Assessing the Effect of Messages in the Home and in School

The high school completion rate for the U.S. has increased only slightly over the last quarter of a century. A promising area of focus for dropout prevention efforts may be found in research that assesses how messages about educational attainment may affect school completion rates. The supportive communication framework is used to address how communication in the home and in school may affect student educational attainment. An extensive search of the student dropout literature was followed by standard meta-analytic procedures. The average weighted effect for communication in the home on high school completion was r=.21, and the effect for communication in school on high school completion was r=.14. The age of subjects and region of the country in which subjects lived were addressed as possible moderators of the relationship between communication in the home and school and educational attainment. No evidence that these variables moderated the relationship was found.

The Impact of Guilt and Type of Compliance-Gaining Message on Compliance.

Consistent with Cialdinis Negative State Relief Model it has been established repeatedly that targets of compliance‐gaining attempts comply with a request to help more frequently when those targets feel guilty than when they do not feel guilty. Expanding upon this result it was predicted that to the extent that a compliance‐gaining message serves as a cue to link compliance with the restoration of positive or neutral affect, the compliance rate would vary. Building upon this reasoning it was hypothesized that a positive self‐feeling compliance‐gaining message would be more effective in producing target compliance than would a direct request message when the target felt guilty, but that the opposite relationship would hold when the target was not feeling guilty. An experiment in which both guilt and message type were varied was designed to test this hypothesis. In the main, the data were consistent with these predictions.

Matching messages to the values underlying value-expressive and social-adjustive attitudes: Reconciling an old theory with a contemporary measurement approach

Functional theory defines value-expressive attitudes as attitudes that are formed to aid in the achievement of ones values, and social-adjustive attitudes as attitudes that are formed from the desire to affiliate with others. The current investigation argues that both functions are based in a persons values, with the social-adjustive function being a specific form of a value-expressive attitude. Contemporary approaches to this theory have argued that these attitude functions can be inferred from scores on the self-monitoring scale, thus eliminating the need to measure the values underlying these functions. The current investigation argues that the success of studies using the self-monitoring scale to infer these functions should be due to the covariance of the other-directedness dimension of the scale with the values underlying those attitudes. Overall, the findings of the investigation indicate that the formation of these functional attitudes depends more on the match between the value-content of the persuasive messages and the extent to which the message recipients hold those values than their level of other-directedness. Other-directedness did not covary with the values that underlie value-expressive and social-adjustive attitudes, but did aid in the reception of the social-adjustive message. Thus, the research using the self-monitoring scale to infer functions cannot be fully reconciled with the conceptualizations of value-expressive and social-adjustive attitudes.