On the role of the speaker's expectations in interpersonal communication

Abstract

The paper reports two experiments which investigated the accuracy of verbal communication between people. The results indicate that communication is most accurate if the sender correctly anticipates the context in which the receiver attempts to understand the communication. If the sender expects the receiver will have more or less information than is actually available, communication suffers. Further, different sorts of information serve different functions. If the sender transmits general categorical information, that information is useful for the receiver in making a category selection, but is of no use in discriminating among categorically related alternatives. However, if the sender transmits information related to specific items, that information is useful for discriminating among alternatives, but less useful for categorical choices. The results are interpreted in terms of a contractual-contextual model of communication.