| Accommodation | The constant movement toward or away from others by changing your communicative behavior.
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| Addiction model | Assumes alcoholism and other addictions are diseases to be cured rather than character disorders to be condemned.
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| Aesthetic moment | A fleeting sense of unity through a profound respect for disparate voices in dialogue.
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| Agape love | An unconditional love for others because they are created in the image of God.
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| Agenda-setting hypothesis | The mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of issues on their news agenda to the public agenda.
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| Aha factor | A subjective standard ascribing validity to an idea when it resonates with one's personal experience.
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| Anticipated future interaction | A way of extending psychological time; the likelihood of future interaction motivates CMC users to develop a relationship.
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| Appropriation | Adopting a rule or resource from another group or the larger culture.
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| Arousal, relational | A heightened state of awareness, orienting response, or mental alertness that stimulates a review of the relationship.
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| Articulate | The process of speaking out on oppression and linking that subjugation with media representations; the work of cultural studies.
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| Assimilation | A perceptual error whereby people judge messages that fall within their latitudes of acceptances as less discrepant from their anchor than they really are.
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| Asynchronous channel | A nonsimultaneous medium of communication that each individual can use when he or she desires.
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| Attitude | A predisposition to respond, composed of beliefs, feelings, and intended actions.
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| Attribution | The perceptual process by which we observe what people do and then try to figure out their intent or disposition.
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| Attribution theory | A systematic explanation of how people draw inferences about the character of others based upon observed behavior.
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| Audience adaptation | The strategic creation or adjustment of a message in light of the audience characteristics and specific setting.
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| Avant-garde | Intellectuals, artists, and reformers in the isolated minority who speak out because they are convinced they are ahead of the times.
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| Avoiding | Responding to conflict by withdrawing from open discussion.
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| Axiom | A self-evident truth that requires no additional proof.
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| Behavioral scientist | A scholar who applies the scientific method to describe, predict, and explain recurring forms of human behavior.
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| Biased elaboration | Top-down thinking in which predetermined conclusions color the supporting data.
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| Boomerang effect | Attitude change in the opposite direction of what the message advocated; listeners driven away from rather than drawn to an idea.
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| Boundary coordination | The process through which the revealer and recipient agree on the same privacy rules for a given disclosure.
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| Boundary turbulence | The conflict that results from parties' failure to coordinate privacy rules and boundary management.
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| Breadth of penetration | The range of areas in an individual's life over which disclosure takes place.
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| Burke's dramatistic pentad | A five-pronged method of rhetorical criticism to analyze a speaker's persuasive strategy— act, scene, agent, agency, purpose.
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| Canons of rhetoric | The principle divisions of the art of persuasion, established by ancient rhetoricians—invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory.
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| Categorical imperative | Duty without exception; act only on that maxim which you can will to become a universal law.
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| Central route | Message elaboration; the path of cognitive processing that involves scrutiny of message content.
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| Chronemics | The study of people's systematic handling of time in their interaction with others.
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| CMC | Computer-mediated communication; text-based messages, which filter out most nonverbal cues.
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| Codetermination | Collaborative decision making; participatory democracy in the workplace.
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| Cognitive complexity | The mental ability to distinguish subtle personality and behavior differences among people.
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| Cognitive dissonance | The distressing mental state caused by inconsistency between a person's two beliefs or a belief and an action.
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| Collectivistic culture | Wherein people identify with a larger group that is responsible for providing care in exchange for group loyalty; we-identity; a high-context culture.
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| Collegial stores | Positive or negative anecdotes about others in the organization; descriptions of how things really work.
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| Communication | The relational process of creating and interpreting messages that elicit a response.
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| Communication model | A view that language is the principal medium through which social reality is created and sustained.
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| Communicator reward valence | The sum of positive and negative attributes brought to the encounter plus the potential to reward or punish in the future.
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| Communitarian ethics | A moral responsibility to promote community, mutuality, and persons-in-relation who live simultaneously for others and for themselves.
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| Comparison level (CL) | The threshold above which an interpersonal outcome seems attractive; a standard for relational satisfaction.
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| Comparison level of alternatives (CLalt) | The best outcome available in other relationships; a standard for relationship stability.
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| Complementary interchange | Interaction based on accepted differences of power.
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| Compliance | Public conformity to another's expectation without necessarily having a private conviction that matches the behavior.
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| Compromising | Conflict management by negotiation or bargaining; seeking a middle way.
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| Conflict | The struggle between people who perceive they have incompatible values and goals or are contesting over scarce resources.
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| Congruence | The match between an individual's inner feelings and outer display; authenticity, genuineness.
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| Connotative sign system | A mythic sign that has lost its historical referent; form without substance.
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| Consent | The process by which employees actively, though unknowingly, accomplish managerial interests in a faulty attempt to fulfill their own.
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| Consequentialist ethics | Judging actions solely on the basis of their beneficial or harmful outcomes.
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| Constitutive dialogue | Communication that creates, sustains, and alters relationships and the social world; social construction.
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| Content | The report part of a message; what is said verbally.
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| Contrast | A perceptual error whereby people judge messages that fall within their latitudes of rejection as further from their anchor than they really are.
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| Control group | Subjects in an experiment who experience no form of the independent variable; a no-treatment comparison group.
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| Convergence | A strategy of adapting your communication behavior in such a way as to become more similar to another person.
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| Cooperative overlap | A supportive interruption often meant to show agreement and solidarity with the speaker.
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| Coordination | The process by which persons collaborate in an attempt to bring into being their vision of what is necessary, noble, and good and to preclude the enactment of what they fear, hate, or despise.
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| Corporate colonization | Encroachment of modern corporations into every area of life outside the workplace.
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| Corporate stories | Tales that carry management ideology and reinforce company policy.
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| Cosmopolitan communication | Coordination with others who have different backgrounds, values, and beliefs without trying to change them.
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| Counterattitudinal advocacy | Publicly urging others to believe or do something that is opposed to what the advocate actually believes.
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| Credibility | The intelligence, character, and goodwill that audience members perceive in a message source.
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| Critical sensibility | An obligation to critique dominant voices, especially those that suppress opposing viewpoints; a responsibility to advocate for those who are muted.
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| Critical theorists | Scholars who use theory to reveal unjust communication practices that create or perpetuate an imbalance of power.
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| Cues filtered out | Interpretation of CMC that regards lack of nonverbal cues as a fatal flaw for using the medium for relationship development.
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| Cultivation differential | The difference in the percentage giving the television answer within comparable groups of light and heavy TV viewers.
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| Cultural Indicators project | The systematic tracking of changes in television content and how those changes affect viewers' perceptions of the world.
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| Cultural performance | Actions by which members constitute and reveal their culture to themselves and others; an ensemble of texts.
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| Cultural studies | A neo-Marxist critique that sets forth the position that mass media manufacture consent for dominant ideologies.
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| Culture | Webs of significance; systems of shared meaning.
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| Culture industries | Entertainment businesses that reproduce the dominant ideology of a culture and distract people from recognizing unjust distribution of power within society; e.g., film, television, music, and advertising.
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| Culture industries | The producers of culture; television, radio, music, film, fashion, magazines, newspapers, etc.
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| Cybernetics | The study of information processing, feedback, and control in communication systems.
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| Deconstruction | The process of unmasking contradictions within a text; debunking.
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| Democratic pluralism | The myth that society is held together by common norms such as equal opportunity, respect for diversity, one person–one vote, individual rights, and rule of law.
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| Denotative sign system | A descriptive sign without ideological content.
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| Depth of penetration | The degree of disclosure in a specific area of an individual's life.
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| Determinism | The assumption that behavior is caused by heredity and environment.
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| Devil term | The word a speaker uses that sums up all that is regarded as bad, wrong, or evil.
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| Dialectical flux | The unpredictable, unfinalizable, indeterminate nature of personal relationships.
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| Dialectical model | The assumption that people want both privacy and intimacy in their social relationships; they experience a tension between disclosure and withdrawal.
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| Dialogic communication | Conversation in which people speak in a manner that makes others want to listen, and listen in a way that makes others want to speak.
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| Dialogue | Communication that is constitutive, always in flux, capable of achieving aesthetic moments.
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| Dialogue | Transparent conversation that often creates unanticipated relational outcomes due to parties' profound respect for disparate voices.
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| Differentiation | The main component of cognitive complexity as measured by the number of separate personal constructs used on the RCQ.
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| Digital age | A possible fifth era of specialized electronic tribes contentious over diverse beliefs and values.
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| Dignity | The worth an individual has by virtue of being a human being.
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| Discourse | Frameworks of interpretation.
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| Discourse ethics | Jürgen Habermas' vision of the ideal speech situation in which diverse participants could rationally reach a consensus on universal ethical standards.
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| Discursive closure | Suppression of conflict without employees realizing that they are complicit in their own censorship.
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| Discursive formation | The process by which unquestioned and seemingly natural ways of interpreting the world become ideologies.
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| Dissonance thermometer | A hypothetical, reliable gauge of the dissonance a person feels as a result of inconsistency.
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| Divergence | A communication strategy of accentuating the differences between yourself and another person.
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| Dominating | Competing to win when people's interests conflict.
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| Double bind | A person trapped under mutually exclusive expectations; specifically, the powerful party in a complementary relationship insists that the low-power party act as if it were symmetrical.
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| Dramatic violence | The overt expression or threat of physical force as part of the plot.
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| Dramatistic pentad | A tool to analyze how a speaker attempts to get an audience to accept his or her view of reality by using five key elements of the human drama—act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose.
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| Duality of structure | The idea that rules and resources are both the means and the ends of group interaction.
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| Economic determinism | The belief that human behavior and relationships are ultimately caused by differences in financial resources and the disparity in power that those gaps create.
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| Ego-involvement | The importance or centrality of an issue to a person's life; often demonstrated by membership in a group with a known stand.
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| Electronic age | An era of instant communication; a return to the global village with all-at-once sound and touch.
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| Emancipation | Liberation from any form of political, economic, racial, religious, or sexual oppression; empowerment.
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| Emotional expression | Managing conflict by disclosure or venting of feelings.
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| Empirical evidence | Data collected through direct observation.
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| Enabler | Within addiction culture, a person whose nonassertive behavior allows others to continue in their substance abuse.
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| Enthymeme | An incomplete version of a formal deductive syllogism that is created by leaving out a premise already accepted by the audience or by leaving an obvious conclusion unstated.
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| Episode | A "nounable" sequence of speech acts with a beginning and an end that are held together by story; an argument, interview, wedding, mediation, etc.
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| Epistemology | The study of the origin, nature, method, and limits of knowledge.
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| Equifinality | A systems-theory assumption that a given outcome could have occurred due to any or many interconnected factors rather than being a result in a cause-effect relationship.
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| Ethical egoism | The belief that individuals should live their lives so as to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their own pain.
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| Ethical imperative | Grant others that occur in your construction the same autonomy you practice constructing them.
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| Ethnography | A method of participant observation designed to help a researcher experience a culture's complex web of meaning.
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| Ethnography | Mapping out social discourse; discovering who people within a culture think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it.
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| Ethnography | The work of a naturalist who watches, listens, and records communicative conduct in its natural setting in order to understand a culture's concept web of meanings.
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| Ethos | Ethical proof, which comes from the speaker's intelligence, character, and goodwill toward the audience, as these personal characteristics are revealed through the message.
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| Evaluation of positive and negative characteristics | Testing the relative merits of each option against the criteria selected; weighing the benefits and costs.
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| Expectancy | What people predict will happen, rather than what they desire.
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| Expectation | In human interaction, our anticipation of how others will act or react toward us.
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| Experiment | A research method that manipulates a variable in a tightly controlled situation in order to find out if it has the predicted effect.
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| Expression/nonexpression | A class of relational dialectics that includes openness-closedness, revelation-concealment, candor-secrecy, and transparency-privacy.
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| External dialectics | Ongoing tensions between a couple and their community.
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| Face | The projected image of one's self in a relational situation.
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| Face concern | Regard for self-face, other-face, or mutual-face.
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| Face-giving | The other-concerned facework strategy used to defend and support another person's need for inclusion.
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| Face-restoration | The self-concerned facework strategy used to preserve autonomy and defend against loss of personal freedom.
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| Facework | Specific verbal and nonverbal messages that help to maintain and restore face loss, and to uphold and honor face gain.
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| Faithful appropriation | Using a rule or resource as it was originally intended.
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| Falsifiability | The requirement that a scientific theory must be stated in a way that it can be tested and disproved if it is indeed wrong.
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| Family homeostasis | The tacit collusion of family members to maintain the status quo.
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| Family system | A self-regulating, interdependent network of feedback loops guided by members' rules; the behavior of each person affects and is affected by the behavior of another.
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| Fantasy | The creative and imaginative interpretation of events that fulfills a psychological or rhetorical need; depicts events outside of the group or in its past or future.
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| Faustian bargain | A deal with the devil; selling your soul for temporary earthly gain.
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| FOICS | Function Oriented Interaction Coding System; a tool to record and classify the function of utterances during a group's discussion.
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| Framing | The selection of a restricted number of thematically related attributes for inclusion on the media agenda when a particular object or issue is discussed.
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| Functional perspective | A prescriptive approach that describes and predicts task-group performance when four communication functions are fulfilled.
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| Functional utterance | An uninterrupted statement of a single member that appears to perform a specific function.
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| Games | Sequences of behavior governed by rules.
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| Gatekeepers | Editors and other arbiters of culture who determine which books, essays, poetry, plays, film scripts, etc. will appear in the mass media.
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| Genderlect | A term suggesting that masculine and feminine styles of discourse are best viewed as two distinct cultural dialects.
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| Generalized other | The composite mental image a person has of his or her self based on community expectations and responses.
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| Global village | A worldwide electronic community where everyone knows everyone's business and all are somewhat testy.
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| Goal setting | Establishing criteria by which to judge proposed solutions.
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| God term | The word a speaker uses to which all other positive words are subservient.
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| Golden mean | The virtue of moderation; the virtuous person develops habits that avoid extremes.
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| Group decision support systems (GDSS) | Media technology designed to promote democratic decision making by displaying all ideas anonymously.
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| Guilt | Burke's catchall term for tension, anxiety, embarrassment, shame, disgust, and other noxious feelings intrinsic to the human condition.
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| Hard-core nonconformists | People who have already been rejected for their beliefs and have nothing to lose by speaking out.
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| Heavy viewers | TV viewers who report that they watch at least four hours per day; television types.
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| Hegemony | The subtle sway of society's haves over its have-nots.
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| Hierarchy of meaning | A rank order of the relative significance of contexts—episode, relationship, identity, and culture— that encompass a given story as an aid to interpretation.
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| Honor | A code that grants worth to an individual on the basis of adherence to community values.
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| Humanistic scholarship | Study of what it's like to be another person, in a specific time and place; assumes there are few important panhuman similarities.
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| Hyperpersonal perspective | The claim that CMC relationships are often more intimate that those developed when partners are physically together.
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| I | The spontaneous driving force that fosters all that is novel, unpredictable, and unorganized in the self.
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| Ideal audience | An actual community existing over time that believes in the values of truth, the good, beauty, health, wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, harmony, order, communion, friendship, and oneness with the cosmos.
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| Ideal speech situation | A discourse on ethical accountability in which discussants represent all who will be affected by the decision, pursue discourse in a spirit of seeking the common good, and are committed to finding universal standards.
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| Identification | A perceived role relationship that affects self--image and attitudes; based on attractiveness of the role model and sustained if the relationship remains salient.
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| Identification | The recognized common ground between speaker and audience such as physical characteristics, talents, occupation, experiences, personality, beliefs, and attitudes; consubstantiation.
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| Identification of alternatives | Generation of options to sufficiently solve the problem.
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| Ideology | Frameworks through which we interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence.
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| Ideology | Knowledge presented as common sense or natural, especially when its social construction is ignored or suppressed.
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| Impression formation | The composite mental image one person forms of another.
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| Index of curiosity | A measure of the extent to which individuals' need for orientation motivates them to let the media shape their views.
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| Individualistic culture | Wherein people look out for themselves and their immediate families; I-identity; a lowcontext culture.
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| Information | The reduction of uncertainty; the less predictable a message is, the more information it carries.
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| Information model | A view that communication is merely a conduit for the transmission of information about the real world.
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| Initial orientation | Communicators' predisposition to focus on either their individual identity or group identity during a conversation.
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| Integrating | Problem solving through open discussion; collaborating for a win-win resolution of conflict.
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| Integration/separation | A class of relational dialectics that includes connectedness-separateness, inclusion-seclusion, intimacy-independence, and closeness-autonomy.
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| Interaction | Intentional acts of group members who are aware of what they are doing.
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| Interaction adaptation theory | A systematic analysis of how people adjust their approach when another's behavior doesn't mesh with what's needed, anticipated, or preferred.
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| Interaction position | A person's initial stance toward an interaction as determined by a blend of personal requirements, expectations, and desires (RED).
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| Interest aggregations | Clusters of people who demand center stage for their one, overriding concern; pressure groups.
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| Internal dialectics | Ongoing tensions played out within a relationship.
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| Interpenetration of structures | Unnoticed change over time as reproduced structures affect each other.
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| Interpersonal constructs | The cognitive templates or stencils we fit over social reality to order our impressions of people.
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| Interpretive approach | The linguistic work of assigning meaning or value to communicative texts; assumes that multiple meanings or truths are possible.
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| Invention | A speaker's "hunt" for arguments that will be effective in a particular speech.
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| Involvement | Stakeholders' free expression of ideas that may, or may not, affect managerial decisions.
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| Ironic appropriation | Using a rule or resource in a way that thwarts its original purpose.
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| Latitude of acceptance | The range of ideas that a person sees as reasonable or worthy of consideration.
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| Latitude of noncommitment | The range of ideas that a person sees as neither acceptable nor objectionable.
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| Latitude of rejection | The range of ideas that a person sees as unreasonable or objectionable.
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| Law of reciprocity | A paced and orderly process in which openness in one person leads to openness in the other; "You tell me your dream, I'll tell you mine."
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| Literary age | A visual era; a time of private detachment because the eye is the dominant sense organ.
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| Local knowledge | Knowledge situated in time, place, experience, and relative power, as opposed to knowledge from nowhere that's supposedly value-free.
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| Logical force | The moral pressure or sense of obligation a person feels to respond in a given way to what someone else has just said or done—"I had no choice."
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| Logos | Logical proof, which comes from the line of argument in a speech.
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| Looking-glass self | The mental self-image that results from taking the role of the other; the objective self; me.
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| Mainstreaming | The blurring, blending, and bending process by which heavy TV viewers develop a common socially conservative outlook through constant exposure to the same images and labels.
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| Maintenance | Persisting in your original communication style regardless of the communication behavior of the other; similar to divergence; underaccommodation.
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| Managerialism | A systematic logic, set of routine practices, and ideology that values control over all other concerns.
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| Me | The objective self; the image of self seen when one takes the role of the other.
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| Mean world syndrome | The cynical mindset of general mistrust of others subscribed to by heavy TV viewers.
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| Media | Generic term for all human-invented technology that extends the range, speed, or channels of communication.
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| Media agenda | The pattern of news coverage across major print and broadcast media as measured by the prominence and length of stories.
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| Media ecology | The study of different personal and social environments created by the use of different communication technologies.
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| Media malady effect | Negative economic headlines and stories that depress consumer sentiment and leading economic indicators.
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| Media richness theory | Purports that CMC bandwidth is too narrow to convey rich relational messages.
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| Medium | A specific type of media; for example, a book, newspaper, radio, television, telephone, film, Web Site, or email.
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| Message elaboration | The extent to which a person carefully thinks about issue-relevant arguments contained in a persuasive communication.
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| Message plans | Mental representations of action sequences that may be used to achieve goals.
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| Message production | A three-stage process of goals assessed, plans selected, and tactics enacted (action).
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| Meta-analysis | A statistical procedure that blends the results of multiple empirical and independent research studies exploring the same relationship between two variables (e.g., TV viewing and fear of violence).
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| Metacommunication | Communication about communication.
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| Metaphor | Clarifies what is unknown or confusing by equating it with an image that's more familiar or vivid.
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| Mindfulness | Recognizing that things are not always what they seem, and therefore seeking multiple perspectives in conflict situations.
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| Minding | An inner dialogue used to test alternatives, rehearse actions, and anticipate reactions before responding; self-talk.
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| Minimal justification hypothesis | A claim that the best way to stimulate an attitude change in others is to offer just enough incentive to elicit counterattitudinal behavior.
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| Minimax principle of human behavior | People seek to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs.
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| Mortification | Confession of guilt and request for forgiveness.
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| Motivation | Needs and desires that drive or draw us to think, feel, and act as we do.
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| Muted group | People with little power who have trouble giving voice to their perceptions because they must re-encode their thoughts to make them understood in the public sphere; e.g., women.
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| Myth | The connotative meaning that signs carry wherever they go; myth makes what is cultural seem natural.
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| Narration | Symbolic actions—words and/or deeds—that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them.
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| Narrative | Story; words and deeds that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them.
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| Narrative coherence | Internal consistency with characters acting in a reliable fashion; the story hangs together.
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| Narrative fidelity | Congruence between values embedded in a message and what listeners regard as truthful and humane; the story strikes a responsive chord.
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| Narrative paradigm | A theoretical framework that views narrative as the basis of all human communication.
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| Narrative rationality | A way to evaluate the worth of stories based on the twin standards of narrative coherence and narrative fidelity.
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| Narrow ridge | A metaphor of I-Thou living in the dialogic tension between ethical relativism and rigid absolutism; standing your own ground while being profoundly open to the other.
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| Need for cognition | Desire for cognitive clarity; an enjoyment of thinking through ideas even when they aren't personally relevant.
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| Norms | Expectations about behavior that members of a community feel should (or should not) occur in particular situations.
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| Objective approach | The assumption that truth is singular and is accessible through unbiased sensory observation; committed to uncovering cause-and-effect relationships.
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| Objective elaboration | Bottom-up thinking in which facts are scrutinized without bias; seeking truth wherever it might lead.
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| Obliging | Accommodating or giving in to the wishes of another in a conflict situation.
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| One-across communication | A conversational move to neutralize or level control within the exchange; when just one party uses it, the interchange is called transitory.
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| One-down communication | A conversational move to yield control of the exchange; attempted submission.
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| One-up communication | A conversational move to gain control of the exchange; attempted domination.
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| Outcome | The perceived rewards minus the costs of interpersonal interaction.
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| Overaccommodation | Demeaning or patronizing talk; excessive concern paid to vocal clarity or amplitude, message simplification, or repetition.
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| Overdetermination | Equifinality; a systems theory assumption that a given outcome could be effectively caused by any or many interconnected factors.
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| Paradigm | A conceptual framework; a universal model that calls for people to view events through a common interpretive lens.
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| Participant observation | A method of adopting the stance of an ignorant yet interested visitor who carefully notes what people say and do in order to discover how they interpret their world.
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| Passive aggression | Making indirect accusations, showing resentment, procrastination, and other behaviors aimed at thwarting another's resolution of conflict.
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| Pathos | Emotional proof, which comes from the feelings the speech draws out of those who hear it.
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| Performance ethnography | A research methodology committed to performance as both the subject and method of research, to researchers' work being performance, and to reports of fieldwork being actable.
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| Peripheral route | A mental shortcut process that accepts or rejects a message based on irrelevant cues as opposed to actively thinking about the issue.
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| Personal space | The invisible, variable volume of space surrounding an individual that defines that individual's preferred distance from others.
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| Personal stories | Tales told by employees that put them in a favorable light.
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| Personality structure | Onion-like layers of beliefs and feelings about self, others, and the world; deeper layers are more vulnerable, protected, and central to self-image.
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| Person-centered message | A tailor-made message for a specific individual and context; reflects the communicator's ability to anticipate response and adjust accordingly.
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| Phatic communication | Communication aimed at maintaining relationships rather than passing information or saying something new.
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| Phenomenology | Intentional analysis of everyday experience from the standpoint of the person who is living it; explores the possibility of understanding the experience of self and others.
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| Pluralistic ignorance | People's mistaken idea that everyone thinks like they do.
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| Postdecision dissonance | Strong doubts experienced after making an important, close-call decision that is difficult to reverse.
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| Pragmatism | An applied approach to knowledge; the philosophy that true understanding of an idea or situation has practical implications for action.
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| Predicted outcome value | A forecast of future benefits and costs of interaction based on limited experience with the other.
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| Principle of veracity | Truthful statements are preferable to lies in the absence of special circumstances that overcome their negative weight.
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| Print age | A visual era; mass-produced books usher in the industrial revolution and nationalism, yet individuals are isolated.
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| Privacy rules | Personal guides for privacy/disclosure decisions shaped by culture, gender, motive, context, and a risk-benefit ratio.
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| Problem analysis | Determining the nature, extent, and cause(s) of the problem facing the group.
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| Procedural record | The recollection of an action taken in a specific situation paired with its consequences; an if-when-then memory.
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| Production | The use of rules and resources to create a new structure; change.
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| Proletariat | The laboring class who lack capital or the means of production and so must sell their labor to live.
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| Proxemics | The study of people's use of space as a special elaboration of culture.
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| Public agenda | The most important public issues as measured by public opinion surveys.
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| Public opinion | Attitudes one can express without running the danger of isolating oneself; a tangible force that keeps people in line.
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| Punctuate | Interpreting an ongoing sequence of events by labeling one event as the cause and the following event as the response.
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| Qualitative research | Research in which the data is recorded in linguistic (non-numeric) form.
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| Quantitative research | Research in which the data is recorded in numerical form.
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| Quasi-statistical organ | A sixth sense that tallies up information about what society in general is thinking and feeling.
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| Rapport talk | The typical conversational style of women, which seeks to establish connection with others.
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| Rational-world paradigm | A scientific or philosophical approach to knowledge that assumes people are logical, making decisions on the basis of evidence and lines of argument.
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| Reciprocity | A strong human tendency to respond to another's action with similar behavior.
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| Reference groups | Groups that members use to define their identity.
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| Reflective thinking | Thinking that favors rational consideration over intuitive hunches or pressure from those with clout.
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| Reflexivity | The process by which the effects of our words and actions on others bounce back and affect us.
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| Reframing | The process of instituting change by stepping outside of a situation and reinterpreting what it means.
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| Relational dialectics | A dynamic knot of contradictions in personal relationships; an unceasing interplay between contrary or opposing tendencies.
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| Relationship | The command part of the message; how it's said nonverbally.
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| Report talk | The typical monologic style of men, which seeks to command attention, convey information, and win arguments.
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| Reproduction | The use of rules and resources to reinforce structures already in place.
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| Requisite functions | Requirements for positive group outcome; problem analysis, goal setting, identification of alternatives, and evaluation of pluses and minuses for each.
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| Resonance | The process by which congruence of symbolic violence on television and real-life experiences of violence amplifies the fear of a mean and scary world.
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| Resources | Materials, possessions, or attributes that can be used to influence or control the actions of the group or its members.
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| Rhetoric | Both the discovery of truth and a persuasive appeal.
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| Rhetoric | Discovering all possible means of persuasion.
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| Rhetoric | The art of using all available means of persuasion, focusing upon lines of argument, organization of ideas, language use, and delivery in public speaking.
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| Rhetorical vision | A composite drama that catches up multiple groups of people into a common symbolic reality.
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| Rhetorician | A scholar who studies the ways in which symbolic forms can be used to identify with people, or to persuade them toward a certain point of view.
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| Ritual | Texts that articulate multiple aspects of cultural life, often marking rites of passage or life transitions.
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| Role Category Questionnaire (RCQ) | A free-response survey designed to measure the cognitive complexity of a person's interpersonal perception.
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| Rule of parsimony (Occam's razor) | Given two plausible explanations for the same event, we should accept the simpler version.
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| Rules | Propositions that indicate how things ought to be done or what is good or bad; recipes for actions.
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| Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity | The claim that the structure of a language shapes what people think and do; the social construction of reality.
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| Segmentation | A compartmentalizing tactic by which partners isolate different aspects of their relationship.
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| Selective exposure | The tendency people have to avoid information that would create cognitive dissonance because it's incompatible with their current beliefs.
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| Selective self-presentation | An online positive portrayal without fear of contradiction, which enables people to create an overwhelmingly favorable impression.
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| Self-construal | Self-image; the degree to which people conceive of themselves as relatively autonomous from, or connected to, others.
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| Self-disclosure | The voluntary sharing of personal history, preferences, attitudes, feelings, values, secrets, etc., with another person; transparency.
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| Self-fulfilling prophecy | The tendency for a person's expectation of others to evoke a response from them that confirms what was originally anticipated.
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| Self-fulfilling prophecy | The tendency for our expectations to evoke responses that confirm what we originally anticipated.
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| Self-handicapping | For the elderly, a face-saving strategy that invokes age as a reason for not performing well.
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| Self-image | Identity; a mental picture of who I see myself to be—greatly influenced by the way others respond to me.
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| Self-perception theory | The claim that we determine our attitudes the same way that outside observers do—by observing our behavior; an alternative to cognitive dissonance theory.
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| Self-referential imperative | Include yourself as a constituent of your own construction.
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| Semiotics | The study of verbal and nonverbal signs that can stand for something else, and how their interpretation impacts society.
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| Semiotics (semiology) | The study of the social production of meaning from sign systems; the analysis of anything that can stand for something else.
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| Sexual harassment | An unwanted imposition of sexual requirements in the context of a relationship of unequal power.
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| Shared meaning | People's common interpretation or mutual understanding of what a verbal or nonverbal message signifies.
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| Sign | The inseparable combination of the signifier and the signified.
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| Signified | The meaning we associate with the sign.
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| Signifier | The physical form of the sign as we perceive it through our senses; an image.
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| Similar skills model | A hypothesis that relationships fare better when parties possess the same level of verbal sophistication.
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| Social construction | The communal creation of the real and the good.
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| Social constructionists | Language theorists who believe that persons-in-conversation co-construct their own social realities and are simultaneously shaped by the worlds they create.
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| Social exchange | Relationship behavior and status regulated by both parties' evaluations of perceived rewards and costs of interaction with each other.
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| Social identity | Group memberships and social categories that we use to define who we are.
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| Social identity-deindividuation (SIDE) | A theory that suggests CMC users overestimate their similarity with others they meet in online interest groups.
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| Social judgment-involvement | Perception and evaluation of an idea by comparing it with current attitudes.
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| Social penetration | The process of developing deeper intimacy with another person through mutual self-disclosure and other forms of vulnerability.
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| Social presence theory | Suggests that CMC deprives users of the sense that another actual person is involved in the interaction.
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| Social structures | Rules and resources of a group; characteristics such as composition, norms, communication networks, status hierarchies, task requirements, and peer pressure.
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| Sophisticated communication | A person-centered message that accomplishes multiple goals.
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| Source credibility | Audience perception of the competence and trustworthiness of a speaker or writer.
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| Source credibility | Perceived competence and trustworthiness of a speaker or writer that -affects how the message is received.
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| Speaker credibility | Audience perception of the message source's expertise, character, and dynamism; typically a peripheral cue.
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| Speech act | Any verbal or nonverbal message as part of an interaction; the basic building block of the social universe people create; threats, promises, insults, compliments, etc.
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| Speech code | A historically enacted, socially constructed system of terms, meanings, premises, and rules, pertaining to communicative conduct.
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| Spiral of silence | The increasing pressure people feel to conceal their views when they think they are in the minority.
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| Spiraling inversion | Switching back and forth between two contrasting voices, responding first to one pull, then the other.
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| Stability/change | A class of relational dialectics that includes certainty-uncertainty, conventionality-uniqueness, predictability-surprise, and routine-novelty.
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| Standpoint | A place from which to critically view the world around us.
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| Strange loop | An unwanted repetitive communication pattern—"Darn, we did it again."
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| Strong arguments | Claims that generate favorable thoughts when examined.
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| Strong objectivity | The strategy of starting research from the lives of women and other marginalized groups, thus providing a less false view of reality.
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| Structuration | The production and reproduction of social systems through group members' use of rules and resources in interaction.
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| Survey | A research method that uses questionnaires and interviews to collect self-reported data that reflects what respondents think, feel, or intend to do.
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| Symbolic convergence | The linguistic process by which group members develop a sense of community or closeness; cohesiveness, unity, solidarity.
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| Symbolic environment | The socially constructed, sensory world of meanings.
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| Symbolic interaction | Communication through symbols; people talking to each other.
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| Symbols | Arbitrary words and nonverbal signs that bear no natural connection with the things they describe; their meaning is learned within a given culture.
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| Symmetrical interchange | Interaction based on equal power.
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| Symptom strategy | Ascribing our silence to something beyond our control that renders communication justifiably impossible—sleepiness, headache, drunkenness, etc.
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| Systematically distorted communication | Operating outside of employees' awareness, a form of discourse that restricts what can be said or even considered.
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| Tag question | A short question at the end of a declarative statement, often used by women to soften the sting of potential disagreement or invite open, friendly dialogue.
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| Taking the role of the other | The process of mentally imagining that you are someone else who is viewing you.
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| Technological determinism | The belief that the impact of a message is determined by the medium over which it's communicated.
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| Technology | According to McLuhan, human inventions that enhance communication.
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| Text | A record of a message that can be analyzed by others; for example, a book, film, photograph, or any transcript or recording of a speech or broadcast.
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| Textual analysis | A research method that describes and interprets the characteristics of any text.
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| Theorem | A proposition that logically and necessarily follows from two axioms.
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| Theory | A set of systematic, informed hunches about the way things work.
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| Thick description | A record of the intertwined layers of common meaning that underlie what a particular people say and do.
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| Third-party help | A method of conflict management in which disputing parties seek the aid of a mediator, arbitrator, or respected neutral party to help them resolve their differences.
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| Threads | Explicit or implicit principles of communication that are integral to multiple and varied communication theories.
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| Threat threshold | The hypothetical outer boundary of intimate space; a breach by an uninvited other occasions fight or flight.
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| Totemizing ritual | A careful performance of a structured sequence of actions that pays homage to a sacred object.
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| Train/plane test | A question about conversation with a stranger while traveling, used to determine whether people are willing to speak out in support of their viewpoint.
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| Tribal age | An acoustic era; a time of community because the ear is the dominant sense organ.
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| Uncertainty reduction | Increased knowledge of what kind of person another is that provides an improved forecast of how a future interaction will turn out.
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| Utterance | A portion of multivocal communication that affects and is affected by one or more other voices in the conversation.
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| Victimage | Scapegoating; the process of naming an external enemy as the source of all personal or public ills.
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| Violation valence | The perceived positive or negative value assigned to a breach of expectations, regardless of who the violator is.
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| Whole-message model | Regards verbal and nonverbal components of a message as completely integrated and often interchangeable.
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