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| Saturday, June 9, 2007 |
| Em Grifin chapter 6 |
Expectancy Violations
Theory
of Judee Burgoon
Early in my teaching career, I was walking back to my office, puzzling over classroom conversations with four students. All four had made requests. Why, I wondered, had I readily agreed to two requests but just as quickly turned down two others? Each of the four students had spoken to me individually during the class break. Andre wanted my endorsement for a graduate scholarship, and Dawn invited me to eat lunch with her the next day. I said yes to both of them. Belinda asked me to help her on a term paper for a class with another professor, and Charlie encouraged nu• to play water polo With guys fron, hi, h„u.,• that night. I said no to those requests.
Sitting down at my desk, I idly flipped through the pages of Httrrton Corrurutnicntion Research (HCR), a relatively new behavioral science journal that had arrived in the morning mail. I was still mulling over m), uneven response to the students when my eyes zeroed in on an article entitled "A Communication Model of Personal Space Violations."' "That's it," I blurted out to our surprised department secretary. I suddenly realized that in each case my response to the student may have been influenced by the conversational distance between us.
I mentally pictured the four students making their requests-each from a distance that struck me as inappropriate in one way or another. Andre was literally in my face, less than a foot away. Belinda's 2-foot interval invaded my personal space, but not as much. Charlie stood about 7 feet away-just outside the range I would have expected for a let's-get-together-and-have-some-fun-thathas-nothing-to-do-with-school type of conversation. Dawn offered her luncheon invitation from across the room. At the time, each of these interactions had seemed somewhat strange. Now I realized that all four students had violated my expectation of an appropriate interpersonal distance.
FIGURE 6-1 Expectancy Violations in a Classroom Setting
Consistent with my practice throughout this book, I've changed the names of these former students to protect their privacy. In this case, I've made up names that start with the letters A, B, C, and D to represent the increasing distance between us when we spoke. (Andre was the closest; Dawn, the farthest away.) Figure 6-1 plots the intervals relative to my expectations.
Judee Burgoon, a communication scholar at the University of Arizona, wrote the journal article that stimulated my thinking. The article was a follow-up piece on the nonverbal expectancy violations model that she had introduced in HCR two years earlier. Since my own dissertation research focused on interpersonal distance, I knew firsthand how little social science theory existed to guide researchers studying nonverbal communication. I was therefore excited to see Burgoon offering a sophisticated theory of personal space. The fact that she was teaching in a communication department and had published her work in a communication journal was value added. I eagerly read Burgoon's description of her nonverbal expectancy violations model to see whether it could account for my mixed response ht the various atm rrsatiunal distances chosen by the four students.
PERSONAL SPACE EXPECTATIONS: CONFORM OR DEVIATE?
Burgoon defined personal space as the "invisible, variable volume of space surrounding an individual that defines that individual's preferred distance from others."2 She claimed that the size and shape of our personal space depend on our cultural norms and individual preferences, but it's always a compromise between the conflicting approach-avoidance needs that we as humans have for affiliation and privacy.
The idea of personal space wasn't original with Burgoon. In the 1960s, Illinois Institute of Technology anthropologist Edward Hall coined the term proxemics to refer to the study of people's use of space as a special elaboration of culture.} He entitled his book The Hidden Dimension because he was convinced that most spatial interpretation is outside our awareness. He claimed that Americans have four proxemic zones, which nicely correspond with the four interpersonal distances selected by my students:
IF TOU CAN READ THIS YOU’RE TOO CLOSE
1. Intimate diaanre: 0 to IS inches (Andre)
2. Personal distance 18 inchies to 4 feet (Belinda)
3. Social distance: 4 to Ill feet (Charlie)
4. Public distance: 10 feet to infinity (Dawn)
Hall's book is filled with examples of "ugly Americans," who were insensitive to the spatial customs of other cultures. He strongly recommended that in order to be effective, ice learn to adjust our nonverbal behavior to conform to the communication rules of our partner. We shouldn't cross a distance boundary uninvited.
In his poem "Prologue: The Birth of Architecture," poet W. H. Auden echoes Hall's analysis and puts us on notice that we violate his personal space at our peril:
Some thirty inches from my nose The frontier of my Person goes, And all the unfilled air between IS'private pagus or demesne. Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes I beckon you to fraternize, Beware of rudely crossing it: I have no gun, but I can spit.'
Burgoon's nonverbal expectancy violations model offered a counterpoint to Hall and Auden's advice. She didn't argue with the idea that people have definite expectations about how close others should come. In fact, she would explain Auden's 30-inch rule as based on well-established American norms plus the poet's own idiosyncracies. But contrary to popular go-along-to-get-along wisdom, Burgoon suggested that there are times when it's best to break the rules. She believed that under some circumstances, violating social norms and personal expectations is "a superior strategy to conformity."5
AN APPLIED TEST OF THE ORIGINAL MODEL
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Whether knowingly or not, each of the four students making a request deviated from my proxemic expectation. How well did Burgoon's initial model predict my responses to these four different violations? Not very well. So that you can capture the flavor of Burgoon's early speculation and recognize how far her current theory has come, I'll outline what the model predicted my responses would be and in each case compare that forecast to what I actually did.
Andre. According to Burgoon's early model, Andre made a mistake when he crossed my invisible "threat threshold" and spoke with me at an intimate eyeballto-eyeball distance. The physical and psychological discomfort I'd feel would hurt his cause. But the model missed on that prediction, since I wrote the recommendation later that day.
Belinda. In the follow-up article I read that day, Burgoon suggested that noticeable deviations from what we expect cause us to experience a heightened state of arousal. She wasn't necessarily referring to the heart-pounding, sweaty palms reaction that drives us to fight or flight. Instead, she pictured violations stimulating us to review the nature of our relationship with the person who acted in a curious way. that would be good news for Belinda if I thought of her as a highly rewarding person. But every comment she made in class seemed to me a direct challenge, dripping with sarcasm. Just as Burgoon predicted, the narrow, 2-foot gap Belinda chose focused my attention on our rocky relationship, and I declined her request for help in another course. Score one for the nonverbal expectancy.violations model.
Charlie. Charlie was a nice guy who cared more about having a good time than he did about studies. He knew I'd played water polo in college, but he may not have realized that his casual attitude toward the class was a constant reminder that I wasn't as good a teacher as I wanted to be. In her 1978 HRC article, Burgoon wrote that a person with "punishing power" (like Charlie) would do best to observe proxemic conventions or, better yet, stand slightly farther away than expected. Without ever hearing Burgoon's advice, Charlie did it right. He backed off to a distance of 7 feet-just outside the range of interaction I anticipated. Even so, I declined his offer to swim with the guys.
Dawn. According to this nonverbal expectancy violations model, Dawn blew it. Because she was an attractive communicator, a warm, close approach
would have been a pleasant surprise. But her decision to issue an invitation from across the room would seem to guarantee a poor response. The tarther she backed off, the worse the effect would be. There's only one problem with this analysis: Dawn and I had lunch together in the student union the following day.
Obviously, my attempt to apply Burgoon's original model to conversational distance between me and my students didn't meet with much success. The theoretical scoreboard read:
Nonverbal expectancy violations model: 1 Unpredicted random behavior: 3
Burgoon's first controlled experiments didn't fare much better. But where I was ready to dismiss the whole model as flawed, she was unwilling to abandon expectancy violation as a key concept in human interaction. At the end of her journal article she hinted that some of her basic assumptions might need to be tested and reevaluated.
Of course that was then; this is now. Over the last three decades Judee Burgoon and her students have crafted a series of sophisticated laboratory experiments and field studies to discover and explain the effects of expectancy violations. One of the reasons I chose to write about her theory is that the current version is an excellent example of ideas continually revised as a result of empirical disconfirmation. As she has demonstrated, in science failure can lead to success.
,CONVOLUTED MODEL BECOMES AN ELEGANT THEORY
When applied to theories, the term elegant suggests "gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct."6 That's what expectancy violations theory has become. Burgoon has dropped concepts that were central in earlier versions that never panned out. Early on, for examplr..hwaharnioaned the idea of a "threat tliresli(ii(i." Even though that hypothetical boundan made intuitive sense, repeated experimentation failed to confirm its existence.
Burgoon's retreat from "arousal" as an explanatory mechanism has been more gradual. She originally stated that people felt physiologically aroused when their proxemic expectations were violated. Later she softened the concept to "an orienting response" or a mental "alertness" that focuses attention on the violator. She now views arousal as a side effect of a partner's deviation and no longer considers it a necessary link between expectancy violation and communication outcomes such as attraction, credibility, persuasion, and involvement.
By removing extraneous features, Burgoon has streamlined her model. By extending its scope, she has produced a complete theory. Her original nonverbal expectancy violations model was concerned only with spatial violations-a rather narrow f$cus. But by the mid-1980s, Burgoon had realized that proxemic behavior is part of an interconnected system of nonlinguistic cues. It no longer made sense to study interpersonal distance in isolation. She began to apply the model to a host of other nonverbal variables-facial expression, eye contact, touch, and body lean, for example. Burgoon continues to expand the range of expectancy violations. While not losing interest in nonverbal communication, she now applies
the theorv to em(,,ional, marital. and intercultural communication as tvell. Consistent with this broad sweep, she has dropped the nonverbal qualifier and refers to her theory as "expectancy violations theory" and abbreviates it EVT. From this point on, so will I.
What does EVT predict? Burgoon sums up her empirically driven conclusions in a single paragraph. It is my hope that my long narrative account of the theory's development will he:p you appreciate the almost 30 years of work that lie behind these simple lines.
Expectancies exert significant influence on people's interaction patterns, on their impressions of one another, and on the outcomes of their interactions. Violations of expectations in turn may arouse and distract their recipients, shifting greater attention to the violator and the meaning of the violation itself. People who can assume that they are well regarded by their audience are safer engaging in violations and more likely to profit from doing so than are those who are poorly regarded. When the violation act is one that is likely to be ambiguous in its meaning or to carry multiple interpretations that are not uniformly positive or negative, then the reward valence of the communicator can be especially significant in moderating interpretations, evaluations, and subsequent outcomes.... In other cases, violations have relatively consensual meanings and valences associated with them, so that engaging in them produces similar effects for positive- and negative-valenced communicators.7
CORE CONCEPTS OF EVT
A close reading of Burgoon's summary suggests that EVT offers a "soft determinism" rather than hard-core universal laws (see Chapter 1). The qualifying terms may, rnore likely, can be, and relatively reflect her belief that too many factors affect Communication to allow us ever to discover simple cause-and-effect relationships. She does, however, hope to show a link among surprising interpersonal behavior and attraction, credibility, influence, and involvement. These are the potential outcomes of expectancy violation that Burgoon and her students explore. In order for us to appreciate the connection, we need to understand three core concepts of EVT: expectancy, violation valence, and connnunicntor reward valence. I'll illustrate these three variables by referring back to my students' proxemic behavior and to another form of nonverbal communication-touch.
Expectancy
When I was a kid, my mother frequently gave notice that she expected me to be on my best behavior. I considered her words to be a wish or a warning rather than a forecast of my future actions. That is not how Burgoon uses the word. She and her colleagues "prefer to reserve the term 'expectancy' for what is predicted to occur rather than what is desired."8 Figure 6-1 shows that I anticipated conversations with students to take place at a distance of 2t4 to 6 feet. How did this expectation arise? Burgoon suggests that I processed the context, type of relationship, and
characteristics of the others automatically in my mind so that I could gauge what they might do.
Context begins with cultural norms. Three feet is too close in England or Germany yet too far removed in Saudi Arabia, where you can't trust people who won't let you smell their breath. Context also includes the setting of the conversation. A classroom environment dictates a greater speaking distance than would be appropriate for a private chat in my office.
Relationship factors include similarity, familiarity, liking, and relative status In one study, Burgoon discovered that people of all ages and stations in life anticipate that lower-status people will keep their distance. Because of our age difference and teacher-student relationship, I was more surprised by Andre and Belinda's invasion of my personal space than I was by Charlie and Dawn's remote location.
Communicator characteristics include all of the age/sex/place-of-birth demographic facts asked for on application forms, but they also include personal features that may affect expectation even more-physical appearance, personality, and communication style. Dawn's warm smile was a counterpoint to Belinda's caustic comments. Given this difference, I would have assumed that Dawn would be the one to draw close and Belinda the one to keep her distance. That's why I was especially curious when each woman's spatial "transgression" was the opposite of what I would have predicted.
We can do a similar analysis of my expectation for touch in that classroom situation. Edward Hall claimed that the United States is a"noncontact culture," so I wouldn't anticipate touch during the course of normal conversation.' Does this mean that Latin American or southern European "contact cultures" wouldn't have tight expectations for nonverbal interaction? By no means; Burgoon is convinced that all cultures have a similar structure of expected communication behavior but that the content of those expectations can differ markedly from culture to culture. Touch is fraught with mranin~; in rvrrv society, but the who, when, where, and how of touching area rn.rtt- r~~t , ulturr-spocifii standard and ru~tom:.
As a male in a rulr rcl.ittcm~fuh, it never Occurred to me that student.,; might make physical contact while voicing their requests. If it had, Dawn would have been the likely candidate. But at her chosen distance of 25 feet, she'd need to be a bionic woman to reach me. As it %vas, I would have been shocked if she'd violated my expectation and walked over to give me a hug. (As a lead-in to the next two sections, note that I didn't say 1would have been disturbed, distressed, or disgusted.)
Violation Valence
The term violation valence refers to the positive or negative value we place on a specific unexpected behavior, regardless of who does it. Do we find the act itself pleasing or distressing, and to what extent? With her commitment to the scientific method, Burgoon may have borrowed the concept of valence from chemistry, where the valence of a substance is indicated by a number and its sign (+3 or -2,
~ for example). The term net worth from the field of accounting seems to capture the same idea.
We usually give others a bit of wiggle room to deviate from what we regard as sta;;dard operatir,g procedure. But once we deal with someone who acts outside the range of expected behavior, we switch into an evaluation mode. According to Burgoon, we first try to interpret the meaning of the violation, and then figure out whether we like it.
The meaning of some violations is easy to spot. As a case in point, no one would agonize over how to interpret a purposeful poke in the eye with a sharp stick. It's a hostile act, and if it happened to us, we'd be livid. Many nonverbal behaviors are that straightforward. For example, moderate to prolonged eye contact in Western cultures usually communicates awareness, interest, affection, and trust. A level gaze is welcome; shifty eyes are not. With the exception of a riveting stare, we value eye contact. Even Emerson, a man of letters, wrote, "The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary.... "10
When a behavior has a socially recognized meaning, communicators can easily figure out whether to go beyond what others expect. If the valence is negative, do less than expected. If the valence is positive, go further. Burgoon validated this advice when she studied the effect of expectancy on marital satisfaction." She questioned people about how much intimate communication they expected from their partner compared to how much focused conversation they actually got. Not surprisingly, intimacy was ranked as positive. Partners who received about as much intimacy as they expected were moderately satisfied with their marriages. But people were highly satisfied with their marriages when they had more good talks with their husbands or wives than they originally thought they would.
On the other hand, some expectancy violations are ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. For example, the meaning of unexpected touch can be puzzling. Is it a mark of total involvement in the conversation, a sign of warmth and affection, a display of dominance, or a sexual move? Distance violations can also he confusing- Andre isn't from the Middle East, so why was he standing so close? I don't bark or bite, so why did Dawn issue her invitation from across the room? According to EVT, it's at times like these that we consider the reward valence of the communicator as well as the valence of the violation.
Before we look at the way communicator reward valence fits into the theory, you should know that Burgoon has found few nonverbal behaviors that are ambiguous when seen in a larger context. A touch on the arm might be enigmatic in isolation, but when experienced along with close proximity, forward body lean, a direct gaze, facial animation, and verbal fluency, almost everyone interprets the physical contact as a sign of high involvement in the conversation.1z Or consider actor Eric Idle's words and nonverbal manner in a Monty Python sketch. He punctuates his question about Terry Gilliam's wife with a burlesque wink, a leering tone of voice, and gestures to accompany his words: "Nudge nudge. Know what I mean? Say no more ... know what I mean?"13 Taken alone, an exaggerated wink or a dig with the elbow might have many possible meanings, but as part of a coordinated routine, both gestures clearly transform a questionable remark into a lewd comment.
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There are times, hovever, when nonverbal expectancy violations are truly equivocal. The personal space deviations of my students are cases in point. Perhaps I just wasn't sensitive enough to pick up the cues that would help me make sense of their proxemic violations. But when the meaning of an action is unclear, EVT says that we interpret the violation in light of how the violator can affect our lives.
Communicator Reward Valence
EVT is not the only theory that describes the human tendency to size up other people in terms of the potential rewards they have to offer. Social penetration theory suggests that we live in an interpersonal economy in which we all "take stock" of the relational value of others we meet (see Chapter 8). The questions What can you do for me? and What can you do to me? often cross our minds. Burgoon is not a cynic, but she thinks the issue of reward potential moves from the background to the foreground of our minds when someone violates our expectation and there's no social consensus as to the meaning of the act. She uses the term communicator reward valence to label the results of our mental audit of likely gains and losses.
The reward valence of a communicator is the sum of the positive and negative attributes that the person brings to the encounter plus the potential he or she has to reward or punish in the future. The resulting perception is usually a mix of good and bad and falls somewhere on a scale between those two poles. I'll illustrate communicator characteristics that Burgoon frequently mentions by reviewing one feature of each student that I thought about immediately after their perplexing spatial violations.
Andre was a brilliant student. Although writing recommendations is low on my list of fun things to do, I would bask in reflected glory if he were accepted into a top graduate program.
Belinda had a razor-sharp mind and a tongue to match. I'd already felt the sting of her verbal Imrb-~ and thought that thinly veiled criti, ism in the future was a distinct pu>•ihtlfh
Charlie was the classic goof-off-seldom in class and never prepared. I try to be evenhanded with everyone who signs up for my classes, but in Charlie's case I had to struggle not to take his casual attitude toward the course as a personal snub.
Dawn was a beautiful young woman with a warm smile. I felt great pleasure when she openly announced that I was her favorite teacher.
My views of Andre, Belinda, Charlie, and Dawn probably say more about me than they do about the four students. I'm not particularly proud of my stereotyped assessments, but apparently I have plenty of company in the criteria I used. Burgoon notes that the features that impressed me also weigh heavily with others when they compute a reward valence for someone who is violating their expectations. Status, ability, and good looks are standard "goodies" that enhance the other person's reward potential. However, the thrust of the conversation is even more important. Most of us value words that communicate acceptance, liking, appreciation, and trust. We're turned off by talk that conveys disinterest, disapproval, distrust, and rejection.
Why does Burgoon think that the expectancy violator's power to reward or punish is so crucial? Because puzzling violations force victims to search the social context for clues to their meaning." Thus, an ambiguous violation embedded in a host of rationally warm signals takes on a positive cast. An equivocal violation from a punishing communicator stiffens our resistance.
Now that I've outlined EVT's core concepts of expectancy, violation valence, and communicator reward valence, you can better understand the bottom-line advice that Burgoon's theory offers. Should you communicate in a totally unexpected way? If you're certain that the novelty will be a pleasant surprise, the answer is yes. But if you know that your outlandish behavior will offend, don't do it.
When you aren't sure how others will interpret your far-out behavior, let their overall attitude toward you dictate your verbal and nonverbal actions. So if like Belinda and Charlie you have reason to suspect a strained relationship, and the meaning of a violation might be unclear, stifle your deviant tendencies and do your best to conform to expectations. But when you know you've already created a positive personal impression (like Andre or Dawn), a surprise move not only is safe; it probably will enhance the positive effect of your message.
INTERACTION ADAPTATION-BURGOON'S NEXT FRONTIER
As evidence of its predictive power, EVT has been used to explain and predict attitudes and behaviors in a wide variety of communication contexts. These include students' perceptions of their instructors, patients' responses to health care providers, and individuals' actions in romantic relationships. For example, Arizona State University communication professor Paul Mongeau has studied men and women's expectations for first dates and compares those expectations with their actual experiences.'' He discovered that men are pleasantly surprised when a woman initiates a first date and that they usually interpret such a request as a sign that she's interested in sexual activity. But there's a second surprise in store for nuo~,t Of these guys When it turns out that they have less physical intimacy than thrv do on the traditional male-initiated first date. We might expect that men's disappointment would put a damper on future dates together, but surprisingly it doesn't.
For Mongeau, EVT explains how dating partners' expectations are affected by who asks out whom. Yet unlike early tests of EVT, Mongeau's work considers how one person's actions might reshape a dating partner's perceptions after their time together-a morning after the night-before adjustment of expectations. In the same way, Burgoon has reassessed EVT's single-sided view and now favors a dyadic model of adaptation. That's because she regards conversations as more akin to duets than solos. Interpersonal interactions involve synchronized actions rather than unilateral moves. Along with her former students Lesa Stern and Leesa Dillman, Burgoon has crafted interaction adaptation theory as an extension and expansion of EVT.'6
Burgoon states that human beings are predisposed to adapt to each other. That's often necessary, she says, because another person's actions may not square with the thoughts and feelings that we bring to our interaction. She sees this initial interaction lrosirioa as made up of three factors: requirements, expectations, and desires. Reqnire•n:ents are the outcomes that fulfill our basic needs to survive, be safe, belong, and have a sense of self-worth. These are the panhuman motivations that Abraham Maslow outlined in his hierarchy of needs." As opposed to requirements that represent what we need to happen, expectations as defined in EVT are what we think really will happen. Finally, desires are what we personally would like to see happen. These three factors coalesce or meld into our interaction position of what's needed, anticipated, and preferred. I'll continue to use touch behavior to show how Burgoon uses this composite mindset to predict how we adjust to another person's behavior.
I'm a "people person" who places a high value on close relationships-a requirement. When I get together with my friend Bob, we usually greet each other with a simultaneous clasp of each other's elbow or a side-by-side shoulder hug, physical contact more intimate than a formal handshake-an expectation. I'd like our nonverbal behavior to convey the enjoyment I think we both feel when we get together-a personal desire. Suppose Bob were to walk up to me with widespread arms to give me a bear hug for the first time in our relationship. This move would be somewhat discrepant from my interaction position, so I'd need to adapt my response in some way. What would I do?
Because I regard Bob's action as more positive than my interaction position, interaction adaptation theory predicts I would either reciprocate his warm approach or at least adjust my behavior in the direction of more intimacy. That means that I'd make the bear hug mutual, or perhaps give an enthusiastic shoulder hug that's longer and firmer than Usual. Conversely, if I liked my interaction position better than Bob's effusive action, I'd compensate by merely going through the motions in a half-hearted way or back off completely. The same principle of compensation would apply if Bob greeted me without any physical touch. I'd try to reestablish our previous level of nonverbal closeness, or at least move to shake hi~ hand .
:\f,out .i decade ago Bur};oon outlined two shortcomings of expectancy violations theun that she found particularly troubling:
First, EVT does not fully account for the overwhelming prevalence of reciprocity that has been found in interpersonal interactions. Second, it is silent on whether communication valence supersedes behavior valence or vice versa when the two are incongruent (such as when a disliked partner engages in a positive violation.1w
Interaction adaptation theory is Burgoon's attempt to address these problems within the broader framework of ongoing behavioral adjustments. There's obviously more to the theory than I've been able to present, but hopefully this brief sketch lets you see that for Burgoon one theory leads to another.
CRITIQUE: WORK IN PROGRESS
I have a friend who fixes my all-terrain cycle whenever I bend it or break it. "What do you think?" I ask Bill. "Can it be repaired?" His response is always the same: "Man made it! Man can fix it!"
Judee Burgoon shows the same resolve as she seeks to adjust and redesign n expectancy violations model that never quite works as well in practice as its theoretical blueprint says it should. Almost every empirical test she runs seems to yield mixed results. For example, her early work on physical contact suggested that touch violations were often ambiguous. However, a sophisticated experiment she ran in 1992 showed that unexpected touch in a problem-solving situation was almost always welcomed as a positive violation, regardless of the status, gender, or attractiveness of the violator.
Do repeated failures to predict outcomes when a person stands far away, moves in too close, or reaches out to touch someone imply that Burgoon ought to trade in her expectancy violations theory for a new model? Does interaction adaption theory render EVT obsolete? From my perspective, the answer is no.
Taken as a whole, Burgoon's expectancy violations theory continues to meet four of the five criteria of a good scientific theory, as presented in Chapter 3. Her theory advances a reasonable explanation for the effects of expectancy violations during communication. The explanation she offers is relatively simple and has actually become less complex over time. The theory has testable hypotheses that the theorist is willing to adjust when her tests don't support the prediction. Finally, the model offers practical advice on how to better achieve important communication goals of increased credibility, influence, and attraction. Could we ask for anything more? Of course.
We could wish for predicted effects of verbal and nonverbal violations that prove more reliable than the Farmer's Almanac forecast of long-range weather trends. A review of recent research suggests that EVT has reached that point. For example, a comparative empirical study tested how well three leading theories predict interpersonal responses to nonverbal immediacy-close proximity, touch, direct gaze, direct body orientation, and forward lean.jQ None of the theories proved to be right all the time, but expectancy violations theorv did better than tile other two. And for what it's worth, the revised EVT ex post facto scoreboard for niv responses to student proxemic violations now stands at four hits and fit) missc,.
QUESTIONS TO SHARPEN YOUR FOCUS
1. What Irroxernic advice would you give to communicators who believe they are
seen as unrewarding?
2. Except for ritual handshakes, touch is often unexpected in casual relationships. If you don't know someone well, what is the violation valence you ascribe to a light
touch on the arm, a brief touch on the cheek, or a shoulder hug?
3. EVT suggests that cornrnunicafor reward valence comes into play only when the violation valence is ambiguous or neutral. Even when experienced in context, what verbal or nonverbal expectancy violations would be unclear or confusing to you?
4. EVT and coordinated management of meaning (see Chapter 5) hold diverse
assumptions about the nature of knowledge, reality, and communication research. Can
you draw the distinctions?
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