Social perception and message awareness as correlates of person‐centered regulative messages

This study reports the extent to which four social and message perception abilities predict the use of person‐centered messages in regulative influence situations: construct differentiation, number of prosocial influence goals, awareness of message effects, and positive outcome predictions. Undergraduate students completed several message tasks along with the Role Category Questionnaire to measure interpersonal cognitive complexity. Construct differentiation and the message analysis variables accounted for 45% of the variance in person‐centered regulative messages. Each of the message knowledge and goal variables was a significant predictor of person‐centered regulative messages. Person‐centered regulative messages were more likely to be produced by people with highly differentiated construct systems, people who had prosocial influence goals, and people who had knowledge of and confidence about the effects their messages would have on their message recipients.