Listener responsiveness and the coordination of conversation.

Abstract

Listeners are often active in conversation, and the feedback they provide speakers can improve the communication. To examine how feedback influences conversation, we had 76 speaker subjects watch a movie and then summarize it to one or two listeners. The- listeners provided varying amounts of feedback to the speaker. When two listeners were present, one could influence the speaker through feedback and the other could only eavesdrop on the conversation. When speakers received more feedback, their narratives were more comprehensible; that is, both listeners understood the movie better. In addition, feedback individuated communication; that is, the listener who provided the feedback understood the movie better than the eavesdropper who listened to the same conversation. In part, feedback produced these effects by coordinating what the speaker said with what the listener needed to know. Listener feedback signaled listeners ' prior knowledge of the movie, and speakers talked most efficiently about those sections of the movie about which listeners had prior knowledge. Traditional research on communication has often proceeded as if the variables affecting it were static and nonemergent, in the sense that most variables do not change during the course of the conversation and that changes that do occur are produced by something other than dynamic interaction between the participants. For example, work on attitude change has studied static characteristics of the source, message, and recipient (McGuire, 1969). Work in nonverbal communication, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Goffman, 1971), also typically focuses on these characteristics by looking at personality differences (e.g., Rosenthal, Hall,

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