The influence of affect on attitude

Priests of the medieval Catholic Church understood something about the relationship between affect and attitude. To instill the proper attitude in parishioners, priests dramatized the power of liturgy to save them from Hell in a service in which the experience of darkness and fear gave way to light and familiar liturgy. These ceremonies “were written and performed so as to first arouse and then allay anxieties and fears ” (Scott, 2003, p. 227): The service usually began in the dark of night with the gothic cathedral’s nave filled with worship-pers cast into total darkness. Terrifying noises, wailing, shrieks, screams, and clanging of metal mimicked the chaos of hell, giving frightened witnesses a taste of what they could expect if they were tempted to stray. After a prolonged period of this imitation of hell, the cathedral’s interior gradually became filled with the blaze of a thousand lights. As the gloom diminished, cacophony was supplanted by the measured tones of Gregorian chants and polyphony. Light and divine order replaced darkness and chaos (R. Scott, personal correspondence, March 15, 2004). This ceremony was designed to buttress beliefs by experience and to transfigure abstractions into attitudes. In place of merely hearing about “the chaos and perdition of hell that regular performances of liturgy were designed to hold in check ” (Scott, 2003), parishioners shoul

Conversational inference and rational judgment

Rationale Interpretationen von Aussagen und Gesprächen beruhen auf der Annahme, daß der Zuhörer sich eine Hypothese über die Intentionen des Sprechers bildet. Es wird ein Modell für die Konversationsanalyse vorgestellt, mit dessen Hilfe gezeigt wird, daß diese Interpretationen bestimmt werden durch die Attribute, die der Sprecher dem Zuhörer zuschreibt. Das Modell wird auf die Analyse von Experimenten der kognitiven Psychologie und Sozialpsychologie angewendet, wobei sich zeigt, daß die experimentelle Anordnung und die Gesprächseigenschaften die Schlußfolgerungen von Untersuchungspersonen beeinflussen können. (psz)'Conversational inference is inductive in nature, requiring the listener to go beyond the information explicitly given in a mesage. This requirement runs counter to the assumption that rational subjects should only operate on the information explicitly given in judgment tasks. Rational interpretations of messages are guided by hearers' hypotheses about the speaker's intended meaning. An attributional model of conversational inference is presented which shows how these interpretations are governed by conversational assumptions, which in turn are governed by the attributions the speaker makes about the hearer. The model is then applied to the analysis of experiments on reasoning processes in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology and decision research. It is shown that the conversational model can predict how experimental manipulations of relevant source and message attributes affect subjects' judgments. In conclusion, failure to recognize the role of conversational assumptions in governing inference processes can lead rational responses to be misclassified, and misattributed to cognitive shortcomings.' (author's abstract

Effects of nonverbal communication on Chatbot's perceived personality and user satisfaction

As artificial intelligence develops rapidly, companies have created exclusive chatbots to facilitate conversational commerce and establish an emotional connection between their brands and their customers. Therefore, shaping the chatbot personality to match the brand image is often the focus of chatbot design. Two studies were conducted to investigate how nonverbal communication elements (avatar, sticker, emoji) affect users' judgment of chatbot personality and explore the effect of chatbot personality on user satisfaction. In Study 1, Kansei engineering was adopted to conduct an online survey using six combinations of nonverbal elements as experimental conditions and the five dimensions of the Brand Personality Scale as Kansei vocabularies. The results revealed that the three nonverbal elements did affect users' perceptions of chatbot personalities; however, the impacts of each element on different personality dimensions varied. In Study 2, based on Study 1, two crowdfunding chatbots with distinct personality traits, sincere and insincere, were developed as the experimental conditions to interact with participants within FB messenger. One hundred fifty valid questionnaires and the click rate of participants during the experiment were collected to measure participants' satisfaction. The results showed that participants were more satisfied with the sincere chatbot than the insincere chatbot. In addition, the personality of the chatbots also affected the participants' judgment of the quality of the messages as well as their willingness to use the chatbots

British and Korean politeness management style in a first-encounter conversation: A cross-cultural analysis of language, behaviour and emotion

Many previous researchers have studied politeness in terms of linguistic strategies which are used to mitigate Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) (e.g. Brown & Levinson, 1987). The nonstrategic politeness was defined in the present study as a general behavioural and face management style in a first-encounter interaction with a stranger with equal status, a situation without apparent FTAs. Three samples of British-British (B-B) pairs, Korean-Korean (K-K) pairs, and Korean-British (K-B) pairs were recruited for video-recorded dyadic conversations. After a 15-minute conversation, they were then asked to answer a questionnaire. The questionnaire contained questions to rate themselves and their interlocutors on six dimensions: Kindness, Politeness, Likeability, Formality, Relaxation, and Interest. The participants were also asked to provide reasons for their ratings. Analyses of the participants' questionnaire responses found the following results. (1) All participants tended to rate their interlocutors more positively than themselves on evaluative dimensions among the six. (2) The K-K group showed a more modest tendency in their ratings compared to the B-B group. (3) The Korean participants of the K-B group had the most divergent ratings between their self-ratings and their interlocutor's ratings of them. (4) Significant correlations of Politeness with Likeability and Relaxation were found to be exclusive to the B-B group, whereas it was Formality and Interest for the K-K group. (5) Identification of social distance and the use of conventional language were the K-K group's cultural-specific reason types for positive evaluations of Politeness. The B-B group attributed their positive ratings on Politeness to turn-taking management. Analyses of the video data focused on five target behaviours: posture, interruptions, mirroring responses, age-disclosure, and self-deprecation. The results of these analyses appeared to be largely consistent with the findings from the questionnaire responses. The B-B group held relaxed postures longer than the K-K group. Covering interruptions and mirroring responses by repeating were more frequently used by K-K than B-B. The K-K group's self-presentation was closely related to Koreans' cultural emphasis on the value of interdependence and hierarchical relations, compared to the B-B group. British and Korean self-politeness management styles are discussed based on the overall results