Cognitive Communication Theory

Delia's study of credibility, for example, begins with a review of literature that he concludes is inconclusive. He says measures of credibility have been confused with measures of the whole persona of an individual, with the result that conclusions of much research bear the weight of inconclusive complexity or simply confusion itself. Accordingly, Delia wanted to go beyond the establishment of additional measurement factors and examine the theoretical basis for the concept of credibility itself. In so doing, he returns to the Aristotelian concept of ethos as noted in the Rhetoric, "the dominant mode of rhetorical proof, [consisting of] a listener's evaluation of a speaker's intelligence, character, and good will" (2:361). The focus of such a study would not be to look at the rating scales of evaluation, but at the evaluative process itself; in other words, on what the listener brings to the experience of listening.

The principal purpose of Delia's res

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rsuasive strategies in case of failure. The answers were analyzed and quantified, and it was concluded that the older and more complex the subject, the more specific the suggested adaptations. Additionally, complex adaptive strategy was found to be a function of the ability to perceive communications needs of individuals, and not of the needs of a social situation as such. Hale's study of undergraduate subjects achieved similar results. She wished to determine whether cognitively simple persons would have more trouble than complex ones in directing their partners to complete a "communicationdependent" task (5:304). Specifically, she wanted to find whether the ability to adapt one's communicative strategies (i.e., creating more effective taskcompletion schemes for conveying messages) to the perceived needs of others in completing a task was dependent on cognitive complexity. The method was to use a wordassociation test to determine cognitive complexity, and then to pair subjects for two tasks, the results of which were quantified. The first was for Subject 1 to tell Subject 2 how to assemble tinker toys (without face contact), and for Subject 1 and Subject 2 to play Password. It was found that more complex subjects more succe
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Approximate Word count = 2357
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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