Ibahrine 11 Teoriesofmessage

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THOERIES of MESSAGE RECEPTION AND PROCESSING

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Dr. Mohammed IbahrineAL AKHAWAYN UNIVERSITY in IFRANE

SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCESCOMMUNICATIONS STUDIES PROGRAM

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Introduction

• Most of the theories in this chapter are firmly in the cognitive tradition

• Cognition is the study of thinking, or information processing

• Thomas Ostrom outline three broad dimensions of the cognitive system:

Codes Structures Processes

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Introduction

• Cognitive codes are the basic elements of information that are kept in memory and manipulated in various ways when we think

• The second dimension is cognitive structures, or ways of organizing codes

• The third dimension of cognition is cognitive processes, or operations

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Introduction

• 1. The first deals with processes of interpretation, or understanding and meaning

• The theories summarized here define meaning and show

1. How it develops

2. How the content of messages and intentions of communicators are understood

3. How the causes of behavior are assessed

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Introduction

• The second section deals with information organization• These theories tell us

How information is integrated into the cognitive system

How it affects attitudes

How we think about information that relates to our attitudes

How consistency is used as an organizing principle

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Introduction

• The third section of the chapter relates to the• process of making judgments• These theories deal with

How information is compared to what we already know and expect, deviations from expectations,

How the value of information is assessed

As you probably already suspect, this is a rather technical and complicated body of theory

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1. MESSAGE INTERPRETATION

• Interpretation is one term for how we understand our experience

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• 1.1 Osgood on Meaning

• In the 1960s, psychology was dominated by behaviorism, but cognitive approaches were just beginning to get popular, and Osgood theory on meaning actually has a foot in both traditions

• Osgood's theory, then, deals with the ways in which meanings are learned and how they relate to thinking and behavior

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What associations do you have for the word flight?

Whatever your associations, these are your connotations for the term

Osgood's theory attempts to explain what these connotations consist of and where they come from

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The learning theory used by Osgood begins with the assumption that individuals respond to stimuli in the environment, forming a stimulus response relationship

The basic S-R association is responsible for establishment of meaning, which is an internal, mental response to a stimulus

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The internal meaning itself can be broken down into two parts: an internal response and an internal stimulus

The whole chain consists of the following:

(1) Physical stimulus

(2) Internal response

(3) Internal stimulus

(4) Outward response

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Meaning, because it is internal and unique to the person's own experience with the natural stimulus, is said to be connotative

Most meanings are not learned as a result of direct experience with the natural stimulus but are learned by an association between one sign and another

A process that can occur in the abstract out of physical contact with the original stimulus

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One of Osgood's major contributions is his work on the measurement of meaning

This method of measuring meaning, the semantic differential, assumes that one's meanings can be expressed by the use of adjectives

Osgood then uses a statistical technique called factor analysis to find your basic dimensions of meaning

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Osgood believes that the three factors of meaning

Evaluation Activity Potency

apply across all people and all concepts

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• 1.2 Attribution Theory

Definition: Account that explains why things happen and

why people act as they do

Attributions are not necessarily correct interpretations of others and their motives

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Attribution theory deals with the ways people infer the causes of behavior

Attribution theory centers on the perceived causes of behavior by ordinary people in everyday life

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Fritz Heider, founder of attribution theory outlines several kinds of causal attributions that people commonly make

These include 1. Situational causes (being affected by the environment) 2. Personal effects (influencing things personally) 3. Ability (being able to do something) 4. Personal effort (trying to do something) 5. Desire (wanting to do it) 6. Sentiment (feeling like it) 7. Belonging (going along with something) 8. Obligation (feeling you ought to) 9. Permission (being permitted to)

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Causal perception is mediated variables in your own psychological makeup

One of these is your meaning to what you observe, and these are crucial to what you "see.“

Meanings help you integrate your perceptions and organize your observations into patterns that help you make sense of the world

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The way you resolve ambiguities and establish a consistent pattern may be different from the way other people do so

Heider calls individual patterns of perception perceptual styles

He recognizes that any state of affairs may give rise to a number of interpretations, each of which seems true to the person involved

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The way you resolve ambiguities and establish a consistent pattern may be different from the way other people do so

One will infer the causes of one associate's behavior according to

Overall experience Your meanings The situational factors The perceptual style

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One of the most persistent findings in attribution research is the fundamental attribution error

This is the tendency to attribute the cause of events to personal qualities

This tendency, however, is reduced when we are evaluating our own responsibility

We tend to blame other people for what happens to them but blame the situation for what happens to us

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2. INFORMATION ORGANIZATION

• The ways you organize and manage information and how information affects your cognitive system

• Attitudes were studied as a kind of "mental“ behavior that is learned and shaped largely as other behaviors are

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• The ways you organize and mange information and how information affects your cognitive system

• Attitudes are viewed as elements of the cognitive system that you hold in your memory and access when you respond to various situations

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• 2.1 Information-Integration Theory

• The information integration approach centers on the ways people accumulate and organize information out some person, object, Situation or idea and form attitude

• An attitude is predisposition to act in in a positive or negative way toward some object

• According to this theory, all information has the potential of affecting your attitudes

• But two variables are important in how attitudes are changed

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• The first is valence, or direction• Valence refers to whether information supports your beliefs

or refutes them

• When information supports your beliefs and attitudes, it has "positive" valence

• When it does not, it has "negative" valence

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• According to this theory, all information has the potential of affecting your attitudes

• But two variables are important in how attitudes are changed

• The first is valence, or direction

• Valence refers to whether information supports your beliefs or refutes them

• When information supports your beliefs and attitudes, it has "positive" valence

• When it does not, it has "negative" valence

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• The second variable that affects the impact of information is the weight you assign to the information

• Weight is a function of credibility

• If you think the information is probably true, you will assign a higher weight to it; if not, you will assign a lower weight

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• So valence affects how information influences your attitudes

• And weight affects how much it does so

• When the weight of information is low, the information will have little effect, no matter what its valence

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• An attitude is considered to be an accumulation of information about an object, person, situation, or experience

• Attitude change occurs because new information adds to the attitude or because it changes one's judgments about the weight or valence of other information

• Any one piece of information usually does not have too much influence on an attitude because the attitude consists of a number of things that could counteract the new information

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• 2.1.1 Expectancy- Value Theory

• One of the best-known and respected information-integration theorists is Martin Fishbein

• Fishbein highlights the complex nature of attitudes in what is known as expectancy-value theory

• Information-integration theory shows how change occurs as a result of newly integrated information

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• According to Fishbein, there are two kinds of belief

• The first belief in a thing when you believe in something, you would say that this thing exist

• The second kind of belief, belief about, is your sense of the probability that a particular relationship exists between two things

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• For example, you might believe in the existence of pain and suffering late in life

• You may also have a belief about pain and suffering, that people want to die so that they can avoid it

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• Attitudes, differ from beliefs, because they are evaluative

• Attitudes are correlated with beliefs and lead you to behave in a certain way toward the attitude object

• Fishbein sees attitudes as organized, so that general attitudes are predicted from specific ones in a summative fashion

• Thus, an attitude toward an object equals the sum of each belief about that object times its evaluation

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• According to this theory, attitude change can occur from three sources

1. Information can alter the believability, or weight, of particular beliefs

2. Information can change the valence of a belief

3. Information can add new beliefs to the attitude structure

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• 2.1.2 Theory of Reasoned Action

• This theory argues that behavior results in part from intentions, a complex outcome of attitudes

• Specifically, your intention to behave in a certain way is determined by your attitude toward the behavior and a set of beliefs about how other people would like you to behave

• Sometimes your attitude is most important, sometimes others‘ opinions are most important, and sometimes they are more or less equal in weight

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• 2.2 Consistency Theories

• One of the largest bodies of work related to attitude, attitude change, and persuasion is consistency theory

• People are more comfortable with consistency than inconsistency

• Consistency is a primary organizing principle in cognitive processing

• Attitude change can result from information that disrupt this balance

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• 2.2 Consistency Theories

• Two theories of cognitive consistency:

• One of the cognitive consistency theories is Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance

• The second is Milton Rokeach' s theory of attitudes, beliefs, and values

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• 2.2 Consistency Theories• 2..2.1 The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

• Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance is one of the most important theories in the history of social psychology

• Festinger teaches that any two cognitive elements, Including attitudes, perceptions, knowledge, and behaviors will have one of three kinds of relationship

• Consistency theory shows how imbalance leads to change

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• 2..2.1 The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

1. The first of these is null, or irrelevant

2. The second is consistent = Consonant

3. The third is inconsistent = Dissonance Dissonance occurs when one element would not be expected

follow from the other

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Two overriding premises govern dissonance theory

1. The first is that dissonance produces tension or stress that creates pressure to change

2. When dissonance is present, the individual will not only attempt to reduce it but will also avoid situations in which additional dissonance might be produced

The greater the dissonance, the greater the need to reduce it

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Dissonance itself is a result of two other variables:

1. The importance of the cognitive elements 2. The number of elements involved in the dissonant

relation

If you have several things that are inconsistent and If they are important to you, You will experience greater dissonance

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How do you deal with your cognitive Dissonance?

Festinger imagined a number of methods:

You might become a vegetarian, or you might start believing that fats are less important than genetics

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1. You might change one or more of the cognitive elements, a behavior or an attitude perhaps

You might become a vegetarian, or you might start believing that fats are less important than genetics

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2. New elements might be added to one side of the tension or the other

For instance, you might switch to using olive oil exclusively

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• 2.2.1 The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

3. You might come to see the elements as less important than they used to be

For example, you might decide that healthisn't as important as state of mind

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4. You might seek consonant information such as evidence for the benefits of meat by reading new studies on the topic

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5. You might seek consonant information such as you might reduce dissonance by distorting or misinterpreting the information involved

This could happen if you decided that although a lot of meat poses a health risk, meat is not as harmful as the loss of important

nutritional ingredients like iron and protein

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5. Dissonance theory predicts that the less the pressure to conform, the greater the dissonance

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3. JUDGMENT PROCESSES

• The theories in this section deal with the ways individuals make judgments in communication- judgments of arguments, nonverbal behavior, belief claims, and attitudes

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• 3.1 Social Judgment Theory

Muzafer Sherif deals with the way people make judgments about messages

Muzafer Sherif’s theory investigates the ways individuals judge messages

People make judgments on the basis of reference points

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1. The first group forms your latitude of acceptance, the statements you can agree with

2. The second your latitude of rejection, those you cannot agree with

3. The third your latitude of non-commitment

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This research procedure is just a systematic way of simulating what happens in everyday life

On any issue, there will usually be a range of statements

Pro or con, that you are willing to tolerate

And there will also be a range that you reject totally

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A person's latitudes of acceptance and rejection are influenced by a key variable-ego involvement

Ego involvement is the degree of personal relevance of an issue

It is the degree to which one's attitude toward something affects the self-concept, or the importance assigned to the issue

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What does social judgment say about communication?

1. First, we know from Sherif's work that individuals judge the favorability of a message based on their own internal anchors and ego involvement

This judgment process can involve distortion

On a given issue, a person may distort the message by contrast or assimilation

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The contrast effect occurs when individuals judge a message to be farther from their own point of view than it actually is

The assimilation effect occurs when people judge the message to be closer to their own point of view than it actually is

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Basically, when a message is relatively close to one's own position, that message will be assimilated,

Whereas more distant messages will be contrasted

These assimilation and contrast effects are heightened by ego involvement

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The second area in which social judgment theory aids our understanding of communication is attitude change

Social judgment theory makes the following predictions:

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1. Messages falling within the latitude of acceptance facilitate attitude change

An argument in favor of a position within the range of acceptance will be somewhat more persuasive than an argument outside of this range

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2. If you judge a message to lie within the latitude of rejection, attitude change will be reduced or nonexistent

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3. Within the latitude of acceptance and non-commitment, the more discrepant the message from your own stand, the greater the expected attitude change

However, once the message hits the latitude of rejection, change will not be expected

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4. The greater your ego involvement in ( the issue, the larger the latitude of rejection, the smaller the latitude of noncommitment

And thus the less the expected attitude change

Highly involved persons are hard to persuade

They tend to reject a wider range of statements than people who are not highly ego-involved, and rejected messages are not effective

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• 3.2 Elaboration Likelihood Theory

Social psychologists Richard Petty and John Cacioppo developed elaboration likelihood theory as a general summation of insights from many other attitude-change theories

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According to this theory, you evaluate information in various ways

Sometimes you evaluate messages in an elaborate way, using critical thinking

Sometimes you do so in a simpler, less critical manner

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Elaboration likelihood is the probability of critical evaluation of arguments

The likelihood of elaboration depends on the way a person processes the message

There are two: the central and peripheral

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The central: critical thinking occurs in the central route

The peripheral: nonelaboration, the lack of critical thinking in the peripheral one

If you use the central, you consider arguments carefully

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Critical thinking depends on two general factors:

Motivation Ability

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Motivation consists of at least three things:

1. Involvement or the personal relevance

The more important the topic, the more likely that you will think critically about the issues involved

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2. Diversity of arguments

You will tend to think more about arguments that come from a variety of source

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3.One’s personal tendency to enjoy critical thinking

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• 3. 3 Expectancy Violations Theory

How do you respond when people violate your expectations?

The common assumption is that when expectancies are met, the other person's behaviors are judged as positive

and when they are violated, the behaviors are judged as negative; however

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• 3. 3 Expectancy Violations Theory

Judee Burgoon has found that this is not always the case

Violations are often judged favorably

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• 3. 4 Interpersonal Deception Theory

Deception involves the deliberate manipulation of information, behavior, and image in order to lead another person to a false belief or conclusion

Typically, when a speaker deceives, that person engages in strategic behavior that distorts

the truthfulness of the information or is incomplete, irrelevant, unclear, or indirect

Ibahrine 11 Teoriesofmessage

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