PRDV211: Foundations of Human Communication

Summary

The Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT) shows how we deal with uncomfortable situations when it comes to meeting strangers, however, most of what we learn in this chapter can also work for those who are already in established relationships. Being in a relationship does not mean you automatically know everything about the person. Just like having awkward moments when meeting someone new, relationships go through the same thing.

Berger (1979) points out that there are three antecedent conditions that exist when trying to reduce uncertainty. Initially, these dealt with two strangers, but lets put them into context of relationships.

• The first, is when the person has the "potential to reward or punish" (West and Turner 157). In dealing with relationships , lets say your boyfriend/girlfriend hates to go to concerts, but you love them. You know that in the past he/she has not gone no matter who the person was, but you decide to give it a shot and buy two tickets. If he/she still says no, that could be looked at as a punishment, but if he/she says yes, then it would be a reward and make you feel special. 
• The second is that the other person "behaves contrary to expectations" (West and Turner 157). If your boyfriend/girlfriend always laugh when you make a bad joke, and then one day they don't, your uncertainty increases. This encourages you to find out that maybe they just had a bad day. 
• The last one is when a "person expects future interactions with another" (West and Turner 157). If you and your boyfriend/girlfriend always go grocery shopping together on Thursday nights because you both have off time, you expect to continue doing that, but you also know that they are taking on a second job, which may interfere with your weekly shopping. This, too, affects your desire of certainty.

All of these examples lead to, what researchers call, relational uncertainty. This is when a person lacks certainty about the future and status of a relationship. This uncertainty can also be experienced when relationships involve partners coming from different cultural backgrounds. 

These are low-context cultures and high-context cultures. Low-context cultures, the United States, Germany, and Switzerland (Hall 1977) are "those in which meaning is found is found in this explicit code or message" (West and Turner 161). High-context cultures, Japan, Korea, and China, put more importance on the nonverbal messages and "most of the meaning of a message is internalized by listeners or resides in the context" (West and Turner 161). People who are able to deal with such differences and other uncertainties have a high tolerance for uncertainty, otherwise known as uncertainty avoidance.

According to West and Turner (2007) 168), there are seven assumptions of URT. These are: 

1. “people experience uncertainty in interpersonal setting; 
2. uncertainty is stressful; 
3. when strangers meet, their primary goal is to reduce uncertainty/increase predictability; 
4. interpersonal communication occurs through stages; 
5. interpersonal communication is the primary means of understanding reduction; quantity and nature of info that people share changes through time; 
6. and, it is possible to predict behavior in a law like fashion”  (p. 168).

The last assumption of the Uncertainty Reduction Theory led to the development of axioms, which led to the development of theorems. It is the most controversial in that it presents a covering law theory, which believes that it can formulate a law that explains all behavior. For example, axiom one claims that if there is lower uncertainty there is more communication. Axiom two claims that if there is lower uncertainty than there is more nonverbal warmth. A theorem, deriving from the two axioms, would claim that for everyone, more nonverbal warmth corresponds with increased communication.

The uncertainty arises when there are many possible alternatives to explain a given situation or encounter. The ability to narrow down, or predict, where the conversation is headed therefore provides for more ease going forward. There are two kinds of uncertainty, which are behavioral and cognitive. Behavioral uncertainty is the degree of uncertainty to how people will act and cognitive is the degree of uncertainty related to cognitions and understanding that person as an individual. An example of behavioral uncertainty would be not knowing how long to hold the door behind you based on how far away the next person is. An example of cognitive uncertainty would be not knowing how much to disclose about yourself if you are meeting a new person. In these situations, there is a level of uncertainty about the proper way to act that might leave the feeling of uneasiness.

There are four ways to reduce uncertainty and lead to the positive associations demonstrated through axioms and theorems. They are:

1. passive
   
2. active
   
3. interactive
   
4. acceptance strategies

For example, you can use a situation of liking another person. A passive strategy would be to observe their actions and try to get a feeling for what they are like through their observations. An active strategy would be to talk to that person’s friends for more information. An interactive strategy involves direct conversation. Acceptance is slightly different in that it is used in previously established relationships. Emmers and Canary state that this would include “simply trusting your partner” (West and Turner 176). Although you may not be entirely certain about what is happening, you have to learn how to trust and accept to deal with the uncertainty, even if it may not relieve it immediately.

Uncertainty Reduction Theory is helpful in that it examines initial interactions, as well a,s uncertainties that occur within a relationship. Its deductive reasoning used in developing theorems is logically consistent, although the validity of these statements have been debated. If one part of the theory is wrong, than the entire thing would be in question. However, researchers continue to find URT useful, and continue to develop it.

Key Terms and Definitions

1. Reciprocity: communication that mirrors the previous communication behavior
2. Self-disclosure: personal messages about the self disclosed to another
3. Axioms: truisms drawn from past research and common sense
4. Theorems: theoretical statements derived from axioms, positing a relationship between two concepts
5. Passive Strategies: reducing uncertainties by unobtrusive observation.
6. Active Strategies: reducing uncertainties by means other than direct contact
7. Interactive Strategies: reducing uncertainties by engaging in conversation

Outside Research This outside research states the fact that social network sites become more popular with every day. Social network sites are huge part of the latest generation, so called Computer – Mediated Communication (CMC). And there are a couple of dimensions of CMC, which are visual and auditory cues, and openness (Instant Messaging – one-to-one communication; Social network sites – one-to-many communication). If in offline world we use three types of uncertainty reduction strategies –passive, active, interactive, the range of these strategies we can apply in CMC depend on two dimensions (cue-poor vs. cue-rich and dyadic vs. open communication). The interactive strategies are the best ones to use in dyadic reduced-cues CMC. However, the passive and active strategies are the best ones to use in cue-richer and open CMC environments, the examples of which are the social network sites. This is because you can “stalk” people for example on Facebook unobtrusively, moreover there are a lot of opportunities of self-presentation on social network sites, referring to example with Facebook, you can tell a lot about yourself on your page starting from when you were born to where and how you spent your last weekend. The researches start with a concept of similarity as a very important factor of social attraction. Their hypothesis is that the lower the levels of uncertainty about the target person, the more socially attracted users of social network will feel. Basically we experience “rewards” either through interaction or passive observation if we have any similarities with a target person, like having mutual friends or listening to the same music. Thus similarity will predict the positive social attraction and will affect the information seeker`s level of uncertainty. So as a result similarity may lead to more effective communication and low the levels of uncertainty. Researchers infer that there is a “positive effect of perceived similarity on the reduction of the level of uncertainty”. This study conducted an experiment, where researchers hypothesized that the level of uncertainty would mediate the relationships between four independent variables which are passive URS`s, active URS`s, interactive URC`s, similarity and the dependent variable social attraction. They experimented on the example of the Hyves website, which is a Dutch social network, the most popular in the Netherlands. It is very similar to US websites such as MySpace and Facebook. The online survey was conducted among 2,188 active members of Hyves. Because the goal of researches was to analyze the uncertainty reduction process among only those participants who recently met people through Hyves, the finding are based on 704 participants. The results showed that passive strategies were the ones most commonly used. 98.9% reported using one or more passive strategies; in addition 83.9% reported using one or more interactive strategies. The least frequent strategy to be used appeared to be the active (only 19.7% actually used it). This study has several aims. The most important one is to investigate which URS`s are best to use among social network sites. As a result it turned out to be that in cue-poor and dyadic CMC environments participants used the interactive strategies. On social network sites people use all strategies, however passive was more commonly used, followed by interactive and then active. The reason for that pattern is that social network sites, again like Facebook encourage us to share as much information about ourselves as possible, thus people use this information to reduce uncertainty about target person. The reason for the active strategy being the least one to use is obvious – usually in order to access the full information about a person you have to be friends with him/her or friends with his/her friends and so on, thus in initial interactions between users it is not possible if you don`t satisfy one of the criteria mentioned above.

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Source: Michael D. High
 This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

References

Marjolijn, L., Antheunis, P. M., Valkenburg, & Jochen P. (2010). Getting Acquainted through Social Network Sites: Testing a Model of Online Uncertainty Reduction and Social Attraction. Journal Computers in Human Behavior, 26 (1), 100-109.