Hello and a Call for Abstracts

[Sherri Condon]

Dear Dr. Penrod:

I am enclosing an abstract in response to your call for papers and our
subsequent communication, in which you indicated your interest in our
results on decison-making in 3 modalities.  I hope you are willing to accept
this abstract, though it is somewhat longer than you requested.  I wanted to
give you an idea of the range of results we could report on, since our
interests are highly consonant with the larger topic of your book as well.
We've been priviledged to learn so much from these studies!

I've included the abstract as an attachment in wordperfect and as an
attachment in ascii.  Let me know if you prefer an alternative.

Thank you for your interest in our work.

Sherri Condon

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Decision-Making in Three Modalities
                                 Sherri Condon and Claude Cech
                                    In the 18 experimental studies comparing face-to-face and computer-mediated interaction reviewed by Bordia (1997), researchers focus primarily on outcomes such as the number of ideas generated or measures of performance on judgment and decision-making tasks.  In contrast, Condon & Cech (1996a,b) focus on the discourse management strategies that participants adopt when they engage in decision-making interactions.  We compare how participants in face-to-face and computer-mediated interactions manage the resources available for communication as reflected in the encoding and interpretation strategies they select.  In previous research involving simple decision-making tasks such as planning a party, barbeque, or weekend of travel, participants in face-to-face interaction adopt a routine management strategy for their decision- making in which decisions are oriented (where are we going to go?), a suggestion is formulated (to the French Market?), and an agreement (yeah the French Market) establishes the proposal as a consensual decision.  Dyads performing the same tasks in synchronous computer-mediated interaction adopt the same decision-making routine, but with proportionately higher frequencies.  The greater reliance on discourse routines in the unfamiliar computer-mediated environment holds for question/answer and request/compliance routines, too.  For these comparisons, the synchronous communication system was designed to be as close to face-to-face interaction as possible by allowing only one message to appear on participants' computer screens at a time.
   For the results that we propose to report, a more complex task has been added, planning the MTV video awards ceremony,  and a third communication environment, asynchronous e-mail, is included.  In addition, the size of the message box in the synchronous computer-mediated condition was set at 4, 10, or 18 lines, since previous results were obtained using only the smallest size.  Together, the original corpus and the new corpus yield 24 face-to-face interactions (8 from the MTV task), 36 4-line computer-mediated interactions (20 MTV), 20 10-line interactions, 20 18-line interactions, and 16 e-mail interactions.  For analysis, transcripts are divided into utterance units (roughly sentences) and each unit is coded for discourse functions such as orienting, suggesting, agreeing, requesting information, and so on.  
   The similarities among the synchronous interactions are highlighted by conventional measures based on proportions of utterances per interaction in 14 code categories.  For example, although the MTV task elicited almost twice as many utterances as the simpler decision-making tasks in the face-to-face condition (ave. 259 vs. 449), the category proportions are highly correlated (r = .94).   Cross-modal correlations range from .52 for the face-to-face and computer- mediated conditions with the simpler tasks to .80 for the face-to-face and 18-line computer- mediated conditions with the MTV task.  Correlations among the 4-, 10-, and 18-line conditions are all .98.  The synchronous computer-mediated interactions from the MTV task still reflect the original result that participants in computer-mediated interactions rely on discourse routines more than participants in face-to-face interactions:  while 45-50% of utterances in the computer- mediated conditions are coded as orientations, suggestions, or agreements, this proportion falls to 30% for the face-to-face condition.  Larger differences are obtained using a measure devised by Condon et al. (1997, 1999) that analyzes sequences of 2 and 3 utterances.
   It is not surprising that participants in the computer-mediated environment expend proportionately more resources on discourse routines that are effective strategies for accomplishing the tasks, but (1) illustrates a management strategy that would be untenable in face-to-face interaction.
(1)  Best Female Video Either we could have Celine Dione's song I'ts all coming back to me or the other one that was in that movie up close and personal.  Aany of the clips with her in them would be good.  Toni Braxton with that song...gosh I can't think of any of the names of anybody's songs.  And show the same clip as before.  What about jewel.  Who will save your soul. Personally I think she should win we could use the clip of her playing the guitar in the bathroom. We need one more female singer. Did we pick who should present the award? I think Bush should play after the award.

(1) modifies the decision routine from a serial arrangement in which each decision is oriented, proposed, and evaluated in a sequence of turns to a parallel arrangement in which a single turn may provide orientations, suggestions, and agreements for several decisions at a time.  Limitations on short term memory make it unlikely that participants in face-to-face interaction would be able to employ turns like (1), and even in the communication system we designed, the text disappears as soon as the recipient begins to type her reply.  Yet the minimal asynchronicity and message permanence afforded by the system inspired 10 of the 60 dyads in the computer-mediated conditions of the MTV task to produce average turn sizes in excess of 30 words, including one pair that averaged 96 words per turn.  This long turn strategy anticipates the long e-mail messages produced by participants in the asynchronous condition and suggests that it is asynchronicity, not the written code itself, that can lead to dramatic differences between oral and written communication.
   The e-mail interactions reveal a profusion of behaviors not observed in the synchronous interactions.  Typically, each message/turn is opened with a greeting and closed with a salutation or signature.  Other managerial activities such as the interpersonal work accomplished by pleasantries (I hope you enjoyed your vacation, Good luck on your exams) cluster at the beginnings and ends of the messages, yielding a sandwich structure in which the decision-making activities are preceded and followed by discourse management activities.  The exchanges of pleasantries and other interpersonal management strategies that emerge in the e-mail interactions contrast starkly with the paucity of explicit interpersonal management in the synchronous conditions, where proportions of utterances in 3 categories that reflect affective qualities of the interactions, disagreements, joking/exaggerating, and requesting/offering personal information unrelated to the decision making, are equally low in all conditions (less than .05).  Management of message transmission, which is accomplished implicitly by turn management in face-to-face interactions but which is frequently explicit in the synchronous computer-mediated interactions when participants cope with the unfamiliar communication environment, is not only frequent in the asynchronous interactions, but also becomes a routine managerial activity, with participants apologizing for not writing sooner at the beginnings of their e-mail messages and then commenting on when they will write again at the ends of those messages. 
   Consequently, when we focus on communication processes and strategies, we find that just as participants rely on the same basic syntactic and semantic regularities of the language in all communication environments, they rely on the same discourse routines, even though the strict adjacency of routine continuations is replaced by turn adjacency in the parallel strategies of the long synchronous turns and e-mail messages.  In contrast, discourse management strategies may differ dramatically in response to differences in the communication environments such as the greater reliance on routines in the synchronous computer-mediated conditions and the management of message transmission described above.  The results also underscore the importance of discriminating among the widely-varying features of computer-mediated communication environments.

Works Cited
                                 Bordia, P. 1997.  Face-to-Face Versus Computer-Mediated Communication: A Synthesis of the Experimental Literature.  The Journal of Business Communication, 34:1, 99-120.
Condon, S., and Cech, C. 1996a.  Functional Comparison of Face-to-Face and Computer- Mediated Decision-Making Interactions. In Herring, S. (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives.  Philadelphia:  John Benjamin.
Condon, S., and Cech, C. 1996b.  Discourse Management in Face-to-Face and Computer- Mediated Decision-Making Interactions. Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication, 6, 3.
Condon, S., Cech, C., and Edwards, W.  (1997) Discourse routines in decision-making interactions.   Working Papers of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Fall Symposium on Communicative Action in Humans and Machines, M.I.T.
Condon, S., Cech, C., and Edwards, W. (1999) Measuring Conformity to Discourse Routines in Decision-Making Interactions.  Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, University of Maryland.


Affiliations
                                 Sherri L. Condon
Department of English
Center for Advanced Computer Studies
Universite' des Acadiens/University of Southwestern Louisiana
Lafayette, LA 70504
condo at usl.edu

Claude G. Cech
Department of Psychology
Center for Advanced Computer Studies
Universite' des Acadiens/University of Southwestern Louisiana
Lafayette, LA 70504
cech at usl.edu