Theory Social Judgement

Author/s Carl Hovland and Muzafer Sherif

Date Summary 1980 1) Attitude change or persuasion is facilitated by judgemental processes and effects. 2) Social judgement is the perception and evaluation of an idea by comparing it with current attitudes. 3) Sherif saw attitude as an amalgam of three zones: a) Latitude of acceptance: The range of ideas that a person sees as reasonable or worthy of consideration. b) Latitude of rejection: The range of ideas that a person sees as unreasonable or objectionable. c) Latitude of noncommitment: The range of ideas that a person sees as neither acceptable nor objectionable. 4) Ego-Involvement refers to how crucial an issue is in our lives and High Ego-Involvement is defined as a membership in a group with a known stand. 5) Contrast is a perceptual distortion that leads to polarization of ideas that happens only when a message falls within the latitude of rejection. 6) Assimilation is a perceptual error whereby people judge messages that fall within their latitude of acceptance as less discrepant from their anchor than they really are. 7) Once weve judged a new message to be within our latitude of acceptance, we will adjust our attitude somewhat to accommodate the new input. a) The greater the discrepancy, the more hearers will adjust their attitudes. b) The message that persuades the most is the one that is most discrepant from the listeners position yet falls within his or her latitude of acceptance or latitude of noncommitment.

Criticisms It is time consuming to identify the three latitudes. SJ assumes a mental structure and process that are beyond sensory observation.

Elaboration Likelihood

Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo

8) The boomerang effect is the attitude change in the opposite direction of what the message advocates. 1986 1) Elaboration Likelihood Theory is essentially a persuasion theory that tries to predict when and how we will be persuaded by communication messages. 2) There are two paths to persuasion: a) The Central Route involves message elaboration. Elaboration is the extent to which a person carefully thinks about issue-relevant arguments contained in a persuasive communication. b) The Peripheral Route offers a mental shortcut path to accepting or rejecting a message without any active thinking about the attributes of the issue or the object of consideration. It has six routes, namely: i. Reciprocation ii. Consistency iii. Social proof iv. Liking v. Authority vi. Scarcity 3) Message elaboration requires motivation. 4) There are two types of elaboration: a) Biased elaboration is referred to as a top-down thinking in which a predetermined conclusion colors the supporting data underneath. b) Objective elaboration is referred to as the bottomup thinking in which facts are scrutinized without bias. 5) Petty and Cacioppo predict that thoughtful consideration of strong arguments will produce major shifts in attitude in the direction desired by the persuader.

The ELM assumes that the audience will only take one of the two routes. It is more of a model than an actual theory.

6)

Cognitive Dissonance

Leon Festinger

1956 1)

2)

3)

4) 5)

Direct Effects

N/A

1930

1)

The Receiver relies on peripheral cues to help them reach a quick decision. a) Speaker credibility is the audience perception of the message sources expertise, character, and dynamism. The theory explains how behaviour can change attitude, unlike in persuasion theories which state that attitudes can change behaviour. Cognitive dissonance is the distressing mental state caused by inconsistency between a persons two beliefs or a belief and an action. There are thee assumptions about human cognition: a) People have a need for cognitive consistency. b) When cognitive inconsistency exists, people experience psychological discomfort. c) Psychological discomfort motivates people to resolve the inconsistency and restore cognitive balance, and there are three ways to solve inconsistencies: i. Justify behaviour by changing the conflicting cognition. ii. Change your behaviour. iii. Justify behaviour by adding new cognitions. Selective exposure prevents dissonance. Reassurance for post-decision dissonance pertains to strong doubts experienced after making an important, close-call decision that is difficult to reverse. The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by shooting or injecting them with appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response.

It is possible through this theory, to manipulate people into certain behaviors. The theory did not specify a reliable way to distinguish a persons degree of dissonance.

The Direct Effects theory fails to acknowledge the complexity of people, especially in how they form judgements and decisions.

Two-Step Flow

Multi-Step Flow / Diffusion Theory

2) With similarly emotive imagery the hypodermic needle model suggests that media messages are injected straight into a passive audience which is immediately influenced by the message. They express the view that the media is a dangerous means of communicating an idea because the receiver or audience is powerless to resist the impact of the message. Paul 1944 1) This theory asserts that information from the media Lazarsfeld, moves in two distinct stages. First, individuals (opinion Bernard leaders) who pay close attention to the mass media and Berelson, its messages receive the information. Opinion leaders and Hazel pass on their own interpretations in addition to the actual Gaudet media content. 2) The theory refined the ability to predict the influence of media messages on audience behavior, and it helped explain why certain media campaigns may have failed to alter audience attitudes and behavior. Paul 1944 1) Diffusion of innovation theory predicts that media as well Lazarsfeld, as interpersonal contacts provide information and Bernard influence opinion and judgment. Berelson, 2) The information flows through networks. The nature of and Hazel networks and the roles opinion leaders play in them Gaudet determine the likelihood that the innovation will be adopted. 3) There are five adopter categories that follow a standard deviation-curve, namely: a) Innovators, b) Early adopters, c) Early majority, d) Late majority, and e) Laggards.

The theory fails to acknowledge the fact that people can be both an opinion leader and a passive follower.

The process involved in the Diffusion Theory is a one-way flow of information.

Saussarean Ferdinand Dyadic Model de Saussure

Barthes Myth Model

Roland Barthes

1983 1) This is the First Level Analysis. 2) The signifier is the sound pattern or the representation, the signified is the concept or reality, the sign is a recognizable combination of a signifier with a particular signified and the signification is the relationship between the signifier and the signified. 3) Saussure argued that signs only make sense as part of a formal, generalized and abstract system. His conception of meaning was purely structural and relational rather than referential: primacy is given to relationships rather than to things. 4) The Paradigmatic Analysis is the commutation test via substitution of the signifier. (This is under Relational System 1 which is the vertical structure that shows the relationship within a sign.) 5) The Syntagmatic Analysis is the examination of sequential, spatial, and conceptual relations. (This is under Relational System 2 which is the horizontal structure that shows the relationship amongst signs.) 6) Arbitrariness is the artificial link between signifier and signified and it has two degrees: a) Denotation is the commonsense (and thus most naturalised) meanings. b) Connotation is the culturally specific meanings. 1977 1) This is the application of de Saussures work on linguistics to cultural texts: unlocking the relationship between popular culture artifacts and dominant ideologies. 2) The myth model is the semiotic analysis of popular culture texts, including the media. a) Identify the various signs found within a particular media text.

Certain signs can cause confusion among people because not everyone interprets signs in the same way.

Barthes assumes that denotation is just another connotation, which is not always the case. There is the assumption that all signs come from a certain myth.

Uses & Gratification

H.E. Rosengren

1974

1) 2)

Media Ethnography

Marie Gillepsie

2005

1)

2)

3)

b) Identify the connotative meanings attached to the signs. c) Identify the social myth(s) that the combination of signs allude to. Uses and gratifications theory attempts to explain the uses and functions of the media for society. There are three objectives in developing uses and gratifications theory: a) To explain how individuals use mass communication to gratify their needs, b) To discover underlying motives for individuals media use, and c) To identify the positive and the negative consequences of individual media use. Ethnography in media refers to an exploration into how television experiences are embedded in everyday lives and relationships, including the wider power relationships that envelop us. Its aim is to study how audiences use media in complex and unpredictable ways and how the meanings they create are neither determinate nor complete. There are three models of international communication, namely: a) Media Imperialism thesis views television dramas like Dallas and Sex in the City; with their glitzy and glamorous lifestyles, as epitomising the crass materialistic values of US-style consumer culture. b) The Development models importance lies in the strong connections that it makes between the development of media infrastructures in the developing world.

The theory assumes that audience members actively seek out the mass media to satisfy individual needs.

It is possible to use more than one model of international communication at the same time.

4) 5)

6)

Media Richness

Richard L. Daft and Robert H. Lenge

1986

1)

2)

3)

c) Global/local model emphasises the multidirectional flows of media around the world. Ethnography shows that no one model can be sufficient to explain audiences. Ethnographic work has three assumptions: a) People are always-already networked, b) People subscribe to certain cultural idioms and, c) Peoples practices and talk are best approached from a comparative framework. Personal experiences, family dynamics and community relations affect the Filipino audiences practices and talk about primetime television and vice-versa. The Media Richness theory modelled the relative efficiency of different communication media for reducing equivocality in organizational decisionmaking. Some of its core constructs are so intuitively appealing, especially the media richness construct. This construct, in turn, is defined theoretically by four subdimensions: a) The number of cue systems supported by a medium, b) The immediacy of feedback provided by a medium (from unidirectional to asynchronously bidirectional to simultaneous bidirectional interaction), c) The potential for natural language (compared with the more formal genre of memoranda, business letters, or data printouts), and d) Message personalization (i.e., the degree to which a message can be made to address a specific individual). In the original formulation, face-to-face communication is the richest mode because it includes multiple-cue

It fails to acknowledge the complexity of media choice. What exactly makes the medium rich or lean?

4)

5)

Social Presence

John Short, Ederyn Williams, and Bruce Christie

1976

1)

2)

Reduced Social Cues

Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler

1986

1)

2)

Social Information Processing

Joseph Walther

1992

1)

systems, simultaneous sender-and-receiver exchanges (providing great immediacy of feedback), natural language, and message personalization. Telephones, letters, and memoranda each offer progressively declining levels of richness. The second core construct of the model is the equivocality of a messaging situation. Equivocality is the degree to which a decisionmaking situation and information related to it are subject to multiple interpretations. To be most efficient, greater equivocality requires more media richness, and lesser equivocality requires leaner media. This theory argued that various communication media differed in their capacity to transmit classes of nonverbal communication in addition to verbal content. The fewer the number of cue systems a system supported, the less warmth and involvement users experienced with one another. Social presence is the degree of salience (i.e., quality or state of being there) between two communicators using a communication medium. This theory specified that CMC occluded the cues to individuality and normative behavior that face-to-face interaction transacts nonverbally. The lack of nonverbal cues led CMC prevented users to become self-focused and resistant to influence, disinhibited, belligerent, and affectively negative. The theory seeks to explain how, with time, CMC users are able to accrue impressions of and relations with others online, and these relations achieve the level of development that is expected through off-line communication.

The theory fails to adapt to the rapid improvement of technology.

RSC assumes that there is always anonymity in CMC.

SIP assumes that the same amount of intimacy can be reached among users of CMC, but it will take longer than faceto-face communication.

2)

3)

4)

Agendasetting Function

Dr. Max McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw

1972

1)

2)

It explicitly recognizes that CMC is devoid of the nonverbal communication cues that accompany face-toface communication. The theory expects individuals to adapt the encoding and decoding of social information (i.e., socioemotional or relational messages) into language and the timing of messages. CMC operates at a rate different from face-to-face communication in terms of users ability to achieve levels of impression and relational definition equivalent to face-to-face interaction. Agenda setting refers to the idea that there is a strong correlation between the emphasis that mass media place on certain issues (e.g., based on relative placement or amount of coverage) and the importance attributed to these issues by mass audiences. Different media have different agenda-setting potential.

It focuses only on intimacy but fails to recognize other factors one would fail to experience through CMC.

The press and the media do not reflect reality; they filter and shape it. Media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important than other issues.

Bibliography: Agenda-Setting Function. (n.d.). Universiteit Twente. Retrieved September 17, 2013, from http://www.utwente.nl/cw/ theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20clusters/Mass%20Media/Agenda-Setting_Theory.doc/ Borsoto-Nasol, C. (Director) (2013, July 9). Cognitive Dissonance Theory. Communication Theory. Lecture conducted from Ateneo De Manila University, Quezon City. Cabanes, J. (Director) (2013, July 30). Semiotics. Communication Theory. Lecture conducted from Ateneo De Manila University,

Quezon City. Cabanes, J. (Director) (2012, August 15). Audience Ethnography. Communication Theory. Lecture conducted from Ateneo De Manila University, Quezon City. Cabanes, J. (Director) (2013, July 27). Understanding Audiences. COM 101 Plenary. Lecture conducted from Ateneo De Manila University, Quezon City. Cabanes, J. (Director) (2013, August 17). Agenda Setting and News Framing. COM 101 Plenary. Lecture conducted from Ateneo De Manila University, Quezon City. Diffusion of Innovations Theory. (n.d.). Universiteit Twente. Retrieved September 17, 2013, from http://www.utwente.nl/ cwtheorieenoverzicht/Theory%20clusters/Communication%20and%20Information%20Technology/Diffusion_of_Innovations _Theory.doc/ Floyd, K. (2011). Social Judgment Theory of Muzafer Sherif. Interpersonal Communication (195-199). Floyd, K. (2011). Elaboration Likelihood Model of Richard Petty & John Cacioppo. Interpersonal Communication (206-209). Hypodermic Needle Theory. (n.d.). Universiteit Twente. Retrieved September 17, 2013, from http://www.utwente.nl/cw/ theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20clusters/Mass%20Media/Hypod ermic_Needle_Theory.doc/ Uses and Gratifications Theory. (n.d.). Universiteit Twente. Retrieved September 17, 2013, from http://www.utwente.nl/cw/ theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20clusters/Communication%20and%20Information%20Technology/Uses_and_Gratifications_Ap proach-1.doc/

COM 101
Communication Theory Reviewer
Prepared by: Paula Marie Celine M. Molina
COM 101-C