Richard L. Conville

Fishbein's conception of belief strength: A theoretical, methodological, and experimental critique

A theoretical critique of Fishbeins conception of belief strength is advanced which examines the concept in the context of Hullian behaviorism. Fishbeins experimental support for the concept is questioned. Finally three studies are discussed that cast doubt on the importance of belief strength weights for attitude predictions.

Belief salience, summation theory, and the attitude construct

In this paper the authors argue that the salience of beliefs about an attitude object (their elicitability) is an independent dimension of persuasion theory. A revision of Fishbeins summation theory is offered to take this dimension into account and to expand the explanatory range of the theory to include and predict temporary effects. Experimental support for the revision is offered. The authors argue for further revision of the attitude construct as borrowed from psychology. Communication scholars should distinguish between changes in “attitudinal tendency” and changes in “manifest attitude.”

Summation Theory and the Predictive Power of Subjects' Own Salient Beliefs

Summary It is argued that the low correlations of summation predictions with semantic differential attitude scores have been due to two problems: (a) the cueing effects of the semantic differential scales themselves; and (b) the elicitation of nonsalient, as well as salient, subject beliefs. An experiment was conducted that eliminated these limiting methodological characteristics. Summation theory predictions were found to correlate with attitude .77 (p < .001), a significantly higher correlation than those usually obtained. In addition, a formula for the proportion of positive to negative salient beliefs was presented and was found to correlate with attitude .60 (p < .01). Implications for attitude measuurement are discussed.

Linguistic Nonimmediacy and Attribution of Communicator's Attitudes

Linguistic nonimmediacy refers to the degree of verbal indirectness with which a person refers to himself or to that about which he communicates. Mehrabians (1966b, 1967a) research indicates that the greater this indirectness of verbal reference in a message, the greater the negative attitude attributed by a reader to the communicator of the message toward his referent. The purpose of this investigation was to test the reliability of this finding using samples of extended discourse collected in a naturalistic setting. The results of the previous research were replicated. Implications of the findings were discussed.

The Effects of Negative Affect Conditions and Concept Involvement on Language Redundancy

Summary Subjects provided free responses to six concepts representing varying degrees of involvement. Responses were obtained from each subject under normal and negative affect conditions. Group data were used. Under negative affect conditions, significant correlations were found between concept involvement and type/token ratio (TTR), tokens per type, response variation index (RVI), and total types. Correlations were in the direction of increased redundancy as involvement decreased and, conversely, increased response variation as involvement increased. These relationships held only under negative affect conditions. Implications were discussed for the problems of communication under negative affect conditions and the assessment of individuals’ internal states from verbal behavior. Finally, a sociolinguistic view of the “language community” concept was offered.

Teaching to Communicate: The Sociolinguistic Problem.

Adapting to cultural pluralism is a problem in education generally and in the college course in applied communication specifically. Although the profession has made great strides in adapting to a plurality of linguistic competencies, the same cannot be said for communication competencies. There is evidence that students’ socioeconomic background may be an important factor in determining grades in the typical public‐speaking‐oriented applied communication course.