Pamela J. Benoit

Criteria for evaluating political campaign webpages

Political candidate Web pages have become de rigeur in presidential campaigns. However, no set of standards have emerged for analysis and evaluation of this new and increasingly important electronic medium for political communication. We articulate a set of design criteria that address both the function (political communication: issues, character) and form (e.g., navigation aids, Web page layout) of these messages. These criteria are then applied to the Internet pages of the Bush and Gore campaigns two weeks prior to the 2000 election. Gores site was more cluttered and less well‐designed than Bushs. The criteria could be used to analyze and evaluate other campaign Web pages.

Consciousness: The mindlessness/mindfulness and verbal report controversies

Contemporary communication theory and research increasingly reflects a cognitive orientation to human behavior. Two key questions underlying any such approach are: Are humans cognitively active? And, if so, can they accurately report on their cognitive activity? Langer and her associates answer the first question by asserting that human behavior is typically mindless, and Nisbett and Wilson respond to the second by claiming that verbal reports are generally untrustworthy. This essay evaluates the research adduced by Langer and Nisbett and Wilson in support of their claims and presents additional data. For a variety of reasons (e.g., faulty design, alternative explanations, atypical phenomena) their claims are inadequately supported. On the other hand, insufficient evidence is available to support contrary claims (i.e., that humans are typically cognitively active; verbal reports are usually accurate). Rather than attempt to defend either of these dialectical contraries, we ought to do two things. First, w...

Conversational memory employing cued and free recall

This study tests two hypotheses: (a) that cued recall elicits significantly more conversational information than free recall and (b) that conversational interactants recall more of their partners utterances than their own. Subjects recalled significantly more of their conversation (about five times more in the cued recall than the free recall condition). There was no difference between recall of their own and other comments overall or in the free recall condition. However, subjects in the cued recall condition remembered more of their own than their interactional partners utterances.

Participants’ and observers’ memory for conversational behavior

This study investigated four hypotheses concerning conversational memory: (1) participants remember more conversational information than observers, (2) participants rely more than observers on memory for specific conversational episodes and less on verbal implicit theories of communication behavior, (3) observers remember more verbal information than nonverbal (when that information is elicited verbally), and (4) observers’ recognition of specific communication behavior is more accurate than frequency estimates of similar behaviors. Each hypothesis was confirmed, which calls into question the practice of generalizing results from studies of observers to conversational participants.

Factors Influencing the Accuracy of Verbal Reports of Conversational Behavior.

Subjects interacted with a confederate in video taped dyads and were later asked to: (a) recognize whether certain specific communication behaviors had occurred during the conversation and (b) estimate the frequency with which certain behaviors occurred in it. Subjects consulted memory for conversational behavior more than they relied upon implicit theories to provide verbal reports. Subjects were better at recognizing the gist of a remark than its verbatim content. As Ericsson and Simons theory predicts, subjects were better able to recognize verbal than nonverbal behaviors (when elicited in verbal form) and were better able to recognize specific behaviors than to generate frequency counts. Subjects were better at recognizing their own than others behavior.

Memory for conversational behavior

Communication theory and research must be informed by memory research. This study investigated how much information from an initial interaction can be remembered with a recognition procedure, and how reorganization of information in memory affects retrieval of conversational behavior. Participants recognized 70–90% of specific verbal and nonverbal behavior, demonstrating that considerable information about conversational behavior is stored and can be retrieved. Retrieval tasks that require reorganization of information stored in memory reduce memory performance. Reorganization was operationalized in two ways: recoding of information about nonverbal conversational behavior into verbal form, and summaries of information about specific conversational behavior into estimates of the frequency of that behavior in the conversation.

Anticipated Future Interaction and Conversational Memory Using Participants and Observers.

For interactants to build a relationship over the course of several encounters they must be able to remember at least some of what transpired in earlier interactions. This study investigated two questions: do expectations about future interactions influence conversational memory, and do conversational participants remember more than observers? Subjects with a choice about whether to interact with their partner again (or about whether to interact with one of the persons they observed) remembered less in general than those expecting to interact with the same person or expecting to interact with a different person. This may be because interactants with a choice focused on securing non‐discursive information in order to reduce uncertainty, rather than on remembering details of what was said in the conversation. Participants remembered significantly more conversational information using cued recall than observers. They also remembered more than observers using recognition items for actual communication behavio...

An Interpretive Perspective on Argumentation: A Research Editorial.

An interpretive view of communication, with its philosophical assumptions about the nature of persons and the nature of communication, provides a perspective from which a variety of scholars study argumentation. In this essay, arguments supporting the value of the interpretive perspective are advanced, and criticisms of it are answered by showing how those criticisms are grounded in philosophical assumptions contrary to interpretive perspectives.

Aggravated and mitigated opening utterances

Four types of aggravated opening utterances (insult, command, accusation, refusal without a reason) and four types of mitigated opening utterances (request, indication of shared responsibility, reaffirmation, and refusal with a reason) were investigated. Ordinary social actors rated each of the mitigated opening utterances higher than aggravated opening utterances on specific appropriateness, general appropriateness, and effectiveness. Hence, the type of opening employed to initiate an argumentative episode influences judgments of appropriateness and effectiveness.

The Structure of Interaction Goals

Man is not just a rational animal. … It is in the use of symbols [hat a man differentiates himself from other men as he puts his personally projected world in the kind of order he can live with. Further, it is through symbols that he relates himself with others so that, in his organized system of interdependency, he may satisfy his needs. (Fogarly, 1959, p. 60)