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Abstract
People are reluctant to share bad news. Reasons include self-presentation and sensitivity to receiver emotionality. An experiment investigated these reasons during interactions between friends and strangers. Females (N = 330, 165 dyads) gave good or bad news to a close friend or stranger. Time to response was recorded. The MUM effect replicated for both friends and strangers. No main effects for friend/stranger or interaction between friend/stranger and news valence were found. Data were more consistent with a self-presentation explanation. Behavioral data were also analyzed to explore communicative behavior that accompanies the sharing of good and bad news. Limitations and implications are discussed.
Notes
Notes. T = Taker, S = Scorer. Responses measured on a 6-point scale where higher values mean more positive perceptions. Tests assumed nonequal variances.
*p < .01.
Notes. Standard deviations are reported in parentheses under cell means. Standard errors are reported in parentheses under marginal means. G = Grand Mean.
Notes. Numbers in parentheses are percentages of the total number of usable scorer cases within each of the valence conditions (Bad News, n = 87; Good News, n = 76).
Notes. Numbers in parentheses are percentages of the total number of usable scorer cases within each of the closeness conditions (Friends, n = 84; Strangers, n = 79). For friend/stranger and greeting: χ2(1, n = 163) = 8.88, p < .01, two-tailed. For news valence and greeting: χ2(1, n = 163) = 2.55, p = .11, two-tailed.
Notes. Numbers in parentheses are percentages of the total number of usable scorer cases within each of the closeness conditions (Friends, n = 82; Strangers, n = 79). For friend/stranger and rejection: χ2(1, n = 161) = 0.06, p = .80, two-tailed. For news valence and rejection: χ2(1, n = 163) = 10.30, p < .01, two-tailed.
The ability to anticipate and identify with another's emotions plays a role here as well, but in this case the ability to gauge the receiver's emotions is marshaled toward avoiding being viewed as heartless.
More detailed information about this bogus test is provided by Dibble and Levine (Citation2010).
Test-takers informed the experimenter when they were finished with the test. The experimenter collected the test-taker's answer sheet and said, “Thank you. I will now get your results. Please make yourself comfortable while you wait.” The experimenter then left the room with the test-taker's real answer sheet. While in the small hallway, the experimenter replaced the test-taker's actual score sheet with a phony score sheet that had been prefilled to indicate either 6 out of 20 correct responses (30%, bad news), or 17 out of 20 correct responses (85%, good news). This manipulation of the scoring sheets served as the induction of the independent variable news valence.
With regard to the six cases about which the coders initially disagreed, the disagreement was primarily due to inconsistent hearing of all of the scorer's dialogue, not because the coders disagreed as to what they considered to be teasing per se. In most cases, replaying the videotaped interaction was sufficient to resolve the discord.
One scorer did greet the test-taker by saying “Holla,” and, because this is a current cultural variation of Hello, it was regarded as a greeting.
Other scorers would frequently begin their news delivery encounter by offering an utterance to the effect of okay, or all right before proceeding to inform the test-taker about her test result. Okay and all right are attention-getting devices placed at the beginning of the communication episode, but Sacks (Citation1975, Citation1995) regards these as different from greetings. In order to be felicitous, greetings must occur according to rules that are different from other classes of utterances that may be used to mark the beginning of talk. For example, unlike okay and all right, the relevance for greetings evaporates after the beginning of the conversation. If a greeting comes later in the talk, it will have already likely gone noticeably absent, which means negative inferences will have already been prompted.
The quoted dialogue is exactly what this particular scorer said to the test-taker. This is not a typographical error.