ABSTRACT
Charles Berger had ambitious goals as a young assistant professor of communication at Northwestern University in the early 1970s. As a newly minted PhD, Professor Berger taught courses in interpersonal communication and was immerged in the academic literature in the area of social interaction. Before detailing the predictions of uncertainty reduction theory (URT), it is first necessary to discuss the developmental and incremental stages of initial relationships. First, consider an illustration of URT. The personal phase is characterized by sharing information related to central attitudinal issues and perhaps some personal problems or challenges. URT proposes that a primary motivating goal during initial interaction is to make sense of the situation as well as the other communicator(s). URT is built upon seven axioms and twenty-one theorems. Berger and Calabrese (1975) borrow the concepts of axioms and theorems from Blalock (1969) to organize their URT. Plan uncertainty is concerned with the plans of communicators in relation to their communication goals.
