Social Norms and Behavioral Regulation in Asynchronous Communication: The Shift of Attention During Speed Communication

ABSTRACT

Speed communication analysis (Wicklund & Vandekerckhove, 2000) suggests that the interplay between communicative velocity and sensorial bandwidth is fundamental to predict psychological consequences in mediated communication. In line with this viewpoint, Bertacco and Deponte (2005) found that students using e-mail communication (speedy media) were more concise and less inclined to take the recipient's perspective than were students who communicated by postal letter (slow media). Drawing on speed communication analysis, two experiments were conducted to examine (a) the presence of social norms and (b) behavioral regulation in e-mail versus postal letter communication. In Experiment 1, students anticipated either an e-mail or a postal letter interaction with a fictitious confederate. Results supported the existence of social norms for speed communication because the simple anticipation of an e-mail interaction resulted in a shortfall in the recipient's perspective taking. In Experiment 2, students who were typing either an e-mail or a postal letter were unexpectedly interrupted. Findings were in line with an attentional model of mediated interactions based on the speed communication analysis: Students who wrote a postal letter were (a) more likely to remember the interruption and (b) less sensitive to external stimuli than were e-mail students. Research limits as well as scope for future research are discussed in the conclusions.

Notes

¹As for the origin of social norms, it could be that media constrains affect the formation of social norm (see Takashi & Susumu, 2001, for social norms formations). Therefore, speedy forms of communication could promote social norm that are speed orienting.

²It is worth noting that all participants were informed that they could give up the experiment if they felt uncomfortable, yet all participants accomplished the experimental task. Moreover, all participants were also told that they would receive a reply within a week and that, although responding was important for the success of the experiment, they were free to reply or not.

³Both personality traits and episodes were balanced through the conditions so that half of the participants viewed personality traits first and life episodes afterward, whereas the other half saw them in the reverse order. The personality traits were intelligent, extroverted, open-minded, studious, wise, and spontaneous. Every life episode described a recipient's experience in about four lines (two brief sentences).

⁴It is important to say that the research presented here, as in Bertacco and Deponte (2005), concerned friendly and informal communications. Therefore, both hypotheses and interpretations must be restricted to this kind of messages.

⁵In this article, sensorial feedback is thought to be important not only for regulating the individual's cognitive response but also to stimulate the individual's motivation. Consider the example of, say, Carla interacting with Jenny. Carla's smile not only makes Jenny understand how to phrase her next sentences (i.e., behavioral regulation) but also could encourage Jenny to maintain the interaction (i.e., motivation).

⁶It is worthily to notice that, by definition, the Zeigarnik procedure is expected to cause good memory performance independently of condition. For this reason, we preferred to consider as crucial dependent variable only the memory of the exact interruption point rather than a more global measure.

⁷We opted for this approach to avoid potential problems related to recipients' addresses. A real-message approach requires informing participants before the experiment about the e-mail and postal addresses. We reasoned that such an approach would not allow us to control for differential address availability between the e-mail and postal letter settings. Moreover, and perhaps most important, to ask students for mail addresses in advance might have either weakened internal validity or led to the selection of an unrepresentative sample of students.

⁸A separate one-way ANOVA with communicative condition (e-mail and postal letter) as independent variable and the accuracy to rewrite the interruption point (from 1 [perfect] to 6 [more than five words missing]) as dependent measure was also run. In line with the hypothesis, participants in the postal letter condition were more accurate (M = 1.43, SD = 1.99) than participants in the e-mail condition (M = 2.40, SD = 1.90), F(1, 59) = 3.68, p = .06.

⁹In one experiment, Pennebaker and Agosti (2002) assigned 17 couples of students to a condition of chatline interaction. Experimental couples had to interact for about 30 min (15 min with and 15 min without a Web cam; the order of camera presence was balanced). Even though there were few couples, a paired-samples t test with presence/absence of camera as within-subject variable and number of words as dependent variable revealed that couples in the Web cam condition tended to exchange more words (M = 971, SD = 242) than in the without-camera condition (M = 882, SD = 178), t(16) = 1.64, p = .10. It is worth noting that students had seen each other before they formed the experimental couple.

Background . This article is based on the Ph.D. thesis of the author.

Acknowledgments . I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Robert A. Wicklund for his constant insightful suggestions during this research. I thank Dr. Federica Gomboso for her precious help in the first experiment and Dr. Antonella Deponte for her personal support. Thanks are also extended to Dr. Angels Colome, who not only read the manuscript and gave me precious suggestions but also encouraged me in writing it. I am grateful to Professor Jacques-Philippe Leyens for his comments on a first version of this article. Finally, my gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers whose useful feedback helped me to improve this article.

Support . The University of Trieste (Italy) supported this research by a fellowship to the author.

Author's Present Address . Massimo Bertacco, Via Giorgione, 17, 30035 Mirano (Venice), Italy. E-mail: [email protected]

HCI Editorial Record . First manuscript received June 22, 2005. Revision received May 3, 2006. Accepted by Gary Olson. Final manuscript received October 5, 2006.—Editor