The Handbook of the Psychology of Communication Technology

S. Shyam Sundar

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118426524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

The Handbook of the Psychology of Communication Technology offers an unparalleled source for seminal and cutting-edge research on the psychological aspects of communicating with and via emergent media technologies, with leading scholars providing insights that advance our knowledge on human-technology interactions. •A uniquely focused review of extensive research on technology and digital media from a psychological perspective
•Authoritative chapters by leading scholars studying psychological aspects of communication technologies
•Covers all forms of media from Smartphones to Robotics, from Social Media to Virtual Reality
•Explores the psychology behind our use and abuse of modern communication technologies
•New theories and empirical findings about ways in which our lives are transformed by digital media

Part I
Theoretical Overviews

1
Interpersonal and Hyperpersonal Dimensions of Computer-Mediated Communication

Joseph B. Walther¹, Brandon Van Der Heide², Artemio Ramirez Jr.³, Judee K. Burgoon⁴, and Jorge Peña⁵

¹ Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

² Michigan State University, MI, USA

³ University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

⁴ University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

⁵ University of California, Davis, CA, USA

The social information processing theory of computer-mediated communication (CMC) was the first of several theoretical models of interpersonal interaction online to explain how individuals and groups formed impressions and developed relational communication via text-based electronic communication. Prior to its introduction, the predominant theoretical approaches to CMC predicted that the relative lack of nonverbal cues in CMC compared with face-to-face (FtF) communication would reduce the socioemotional quality of communication online. The social information processing (SIP) theory, in particular, articulated assumptions about the CMC medium, the relationships between nonverbal and verbal cue systems, and users’ adaptation to media that represented a significant departure from other prevalent models at the time it was introduced.

Premises of the social information processing theory became the basis for several models to follow, including the hyperpersonal model of CMC. Both approaches to CMC focus on message qualities and how the characteristics of the CMC channel (such as the lack of most nonverbal cues, and, at times, the asynchronous nature of messaging systems) interact with interpersonal goals and strategies, resulting in systematic patterns of interaction via mediated channels. They each involve a high degree of human agency and depict how users appropriate the channel and its technological characteristics to suit their communicative purposes. They depict CMC users as more or less creative and opportunistic rather than as passive adopters of a relatively restricted medium. This chapter reviews the development, status, and future of the social information processing theory and hyperpersonal model of CMC, and their potential contributions to our knowledge about new media in interpersonal relations.

The Social Information Processing Theory of CMC

To understand these models and their potential contributions fully, it is useful to consider the emergence of SIP in its historical theoretical context.

The theoretical landscape prior to SIP

Although it would not be until the mid-1990s that the Internet was available to the general public, CMC started its adoption in a few professional, educational, and recreational venues in the late 1970s and 1980s. As it appeared in high-tech businesses and proprietary services like CompuServe and Prodigy, in universities and dial-up bulletin-board systems (see Rapaport, 1991), researchers, journalists, and early adopters began to ask how CMC might change communication and how its changes might affect the social processes to which it may be put (e.g., Hiltz & Turoff, 1978; Johansen, Vallee, & Spangler, 1979; Rheingold, 1993).

The new medium was text-based, rather than multimodal. That is, compared with FtF communication, and even to telephone conversations, there were no nonverbal cues accompanying the written messages in CMC. Early on, research considered this characteristic a likely culprit that would make CMC devoid of social and interpersonal richness. The SIP and hyperpersonal models would turn this concern on its head, so to speak, first by addressing how users overcome the lack of nonverbal cues in making their messages sufficiently personal over time, and later, by explaining the actual advantages that accompany the flexibility of communicating via language and only language.

Although CMC sent written messages across vast distances almost instantaneously, it also featured the ability to “store-and-forward” messages asynchronously. Most commonly seen in email, and now text messaging and social network systems, asynchronous communication means that one individual can post a message and it is retained in the CMC system until its intended reader(s) examine it at another time, at their convenience. This characteristic, too, departed from FtF and telephone messaging. Some observers suggested that asynchronous messaging would make it impossible for communicators to make coherent sense of a series of messages and responses (see, e.g., McGrath, 1990). The hyperpersonal model of CMC, in particular, would argue how asynchronous communication and the perceived control over message construction can actually be advantageous and facilitate more desirable messages and enhanced communicative control (Schouten, Valkenburg, & Peter, 2007).

When CMC was new and first being studied, then, much was expected, but much doubt about its interpersonal potential also accompanied the early theories and research about the new medium. Would CMC simply facilitate communication without any particular change, and obviate the need to schedule (or travel to) FtF meetings (Rockart & DeLong, 1988; cf. Vallee et al., 1975)? Would communicating with others remotely, without nonverbal cues, dehumanize its users (see Orcutt & Anderson, 1977)?

To answer these and more middle-range questions about the effects of interactive media, researchers appropriated established theories from teleconferencing research and developed original theories focusing on CMC per se for the purpose of predicting and explaining the likely effects of online interaction, primarily in large and small groups. These positions, as it turned out, were consistent with many positions in nonverbal communication research. The earliest theoretical positions argued that since the vast majority of our emotional expressions relied on the exhibition and detection of nonverbally encoded messages, text-based messaging without nonverbal cues must therefore lack socioemotional expression. Some theorists went farther to suggest that CMC, without the warmth of natural human communication, would lead users to antagonism and hostility with one another. Empirical research, primarily experimental, seemed to support these predictions.

The assumptions and propositions of the “cues-filtered-out” approaches to CMC (see Culnan & Markus, 1987) have been summarized in numerous publications. Their essential position is that nonverbal cues facilitate a number of functions related to identifying who others are, what their individual personalities are, how they express emotion, and what their utterances mean. As though nonverbal cues have a unique capacity to accomplish these functions, the general argument of these approaches is that CMC, without nonverbal cues, is impoverished or is incapable of supporting these communicative functions (for review, see Walther, 2010). Small group interaction research long held that in order to be successful, groups need to support both task and socioemotional communication. Task communication is the facts, opinions, ideas, and arguments that group members need to surface in order to inform their decision making. Socioemotional messages convey charisma, humor, agreement, and interpersonal regard, and are also considered critical in order for groups to have effective and satisfying conversations. Research concerned itself with the question of whether and how well CMC could support both these aspects of small group interaction.

Empirical support for these positions often involved experiments comparing small groups communicating by CMC or FtF methods for a limited time, and content analysis of transcripts with which to compare verbal communication in both settings. Many such experiments appeared to support the cues-filtered-out perspective.

At about the same time as these theoretical and research-based interpretations of the effects of CMC appeared in the management, information systems, engineering, and psychology literature, stories of a quite different nature appeared, sometimes in academic outlets, and at other times in the popular press. Anecdotes described shy youngsters who found friends online, and remained online, who had never experienced the kinds of best friends as they did in cyberspace. Spontaneous romances arose via text, surprising their participants with emotional intensity, and appalling their friends. Case studies of high-tech firms showed that internal networks were being used as much for play as for work (Ord, 1989; Steinfield, 1986), for exchanging movie reviews as a hobby as much as distributing parking rules to employees. The cases did not fit the theories, and the experiments were at odds with the anecdotes. Although anecdotal examples should not be definitive scientifically, they seemed to reflect the experiences of a growing number of CMC users, while the theories and research seemed to map on to the suspicions about the medium among those who had not engrossed in it as much.

One other departure from the cues-filtered-out approach appeared in a theory of managerial media selection. It was originally referred to, also, as the social information processing theory of CMC. The term, in this case, came from work by Salancik and Pfeffer (1978), who had argued that managers’ perceptions of organizational artifacts are influenced by the social information one’s coworkers generate in regard to them. That is, managers perceive things due in part to the communication reflecting others’ perceptions of those same things. Fulk, Steinfield, and colleagues (1987) applied this approach to organizational members’ perception of the richness of email. They argued, and later demonstrated empirically, that workers viewed email’s expressiveness based not only on their own apprehension of email’s capacity, and not only due to its actual features, but to a significant extent their perceptions were affected by the opinions and email-oriented behaviors of other individuals who shared strong sociometric ties to one another. Fulk and colleagues soon renamed their model a social influence theory of CMC (e.g., Fulk, Schmitz, & Steinfield, 1990).

Social information processing

The other social information processing theory of CMC, introduced in the 1992 Communication Research article by Walther, was the first formal theory among several that would soon emerge to suggest predictions and explanations about the relational potential of online communication alternative to the cues-filtered-out approach. The introduction of the theory attempted several objectives: to reflect a fundamental but relatively obscure set of paradigmatic assumptions about the relationship of verbal and nonverbal message cues and the relevance of this relationship for the translation of affective expression from physical to verbal behavior when physical behavior is obviated; to be able to account both for the impersonal communication findings of numerous laboratory studies and to account for the anecdotal accounts of relationship development online, through identification of specific factors with the potential to moderate the effect of the medium on its users’ communication; and to articulate new theoretical propositions capable of generating testable hypotheses and a new view of CMC. SIP specified a new set of assumptions about what people do when they communicate using different channels, and how they respond to a severe reduction of nonverbal cues by CMC.

The theory seeks to explain how, with time, CMC users are able to accrue impressions of and relations with others online that achieve the level of development that is expected through offline communication. It was developed in light of certain philosophies of communication that are useful in understanding the positions laid out by SIP...