ABSTRACT
In 1995, Waldron, reflecting on rising disenchantment with the “psychologi-zation” of communication and its overemphasis on the nonsocial, posed the question, “Is the ’Golden Age of Cognition’ losing its lustre?” His essay lucidly captured a view we share. It is one we have articulated elsewhere in the rationales for two recently advanced communication theories: Interaction Adaptation Theory (Burgoon, Stern, & Dillman, 1995; White, 1996) and Interpersonal Deception Theory (Buller & Burgoon, 1996; Buller, Burgoon, White, & Ebesu, 1994; Burgoon & Buller, 1996). Like Waldron, we believe that the crown of cognition is becoming increasingly tarnished and that its faddish reign should and will give way to a more comprehensive approach to human message behavior. Because we also believe that communication theorists will eventually “come home,” doing what they do best by centering on truly communicative phenomena and leaving psychologists to predict and explain intrapsychic activity, we wish to advocate a research agenda that propels interpersonal communication work on nonverbal and verbal encoding in that direction. It is an agenda guided by Interaction Adaptation Theory (IAT). In preview, IAT does not eschew reference to cognitions but places them within the broader context of a set of affective and conative factors that predispose communicators to produce certain kinds of messages. Further, the cognitive factors that are featured in IAT are a select group which are linked directly to communication behavior. IAT also acknowledges that message behavior varies in degree of intentionality, planning, and automaticity, so that deliberative cognitive planning and effort are “demoted” from the position of prominence they have held of late. Most importantly, perhaps, IAT, as an interpersonal and interactional theory, looks to cointerac-tants’ behaviors as major influences on a given communicator’s messages. In other words, once an interaction commences, the communication patterns of an interaction partner may gain prepotency over one’s own cognitions and affect as determinants of communication behavior. Recognition that one communicator’s message production is highly susceptible to the influence of another’s communication, often in unconscious ways, warrants a paradigm shift toward much greater research emphasis on: (a) relationships rather than individuals, (b) interdependent rather than independent action, (c) overt rather than covert processes, (d) complexes of meaningful behaviors rather than single message elements, and (e) dynamic patterns and sequences of behavioral adaptation rather than initial, static, or stable displays. Such a paradigm shift would highlight a somewhat different view of communication and symbolic signaling than, we believe, is currently promulgated in much message-production research.
