On Defining Conversational Coordination and Rapport

The construct of rapport is arguably one of the central, if not the central, construct necessary to understanding successful helping relationships and to explaining the development of personal relationships. The role of nonverbal behavior in initiating and signaling rapport has its roots in the work of Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1967). Tickle-Degnen and Rosenthal substantially advance our knowledge about the relationship between rapport and nonverbal behavior in the meta-analyses presented in this and other articles (see Tickle-Degnen & Rosenthal, 1987). My purpose in this response is to offer a critical reaction to the conceptual analyses of this article and to end with what, I hope, are constructive suggestions. For a construct to be a valuable one in scientific inquiry, it must meet a variety of criteria, some of which are internal to the construct itself and others external to the construct. The former concern questions such as conceptual precision, operational clarity, absence of tautology, among others. The latter, external criteria concern the utility of the construct in increasing our understanding of the processes under scrutiny. Let me take up each of these general criteria in turn as applied to the concept of rapport. Rapport is defined as a feeling state experienced in interaction with another as interest, positivity, and coordination (or balance). These internal states can be manifested behaviorally through signs of interest and involvement, signs of positivity, and patterns of coordination, synchrony, or responsiveness in interaction, respectively. The authors make cogent arguments for the necessity of both the interest and positivity states being high for rapport to be present. What is not as clear is why the feeling of coordination must also be high. Certainly, the feeling of being "in sync" or in tune with another is a positive feeling state. But can people distinguish this feeling of positivity from the general positivity experienced in interacting with another? This raises the question of whether the third component is necessary or, rather, is simply another basis for general positivity and, hence, confounded with the first component. If the argument is that actual behavioral coordination leads to positive feelings about the interaction and the other person, then that is a different claim, an important claim, and one not without empirical backing (see Cappella, 1988, for a review). Note that I am raising a question about the need for "felt coordination" as a necessary feature of the definition of rapport; I am not denying that behavioral coordination may give rise to feelings of positivity and mutual interest. I also have some serious questions about the definition of behavioral coordination, both conceptually and operationally. Coordination could be defined in a wide variety of ways: micromomentary synchrony in movement and speech (Condon & Ogston, 1967), congruence of mean levels of behavior (Jaffe & Feldstein, 1970), adjustment of rhythms (Warner, 1988), responsiveness (Davis, 1982), topical coherence (Tracy, 1982), magnitude and direction of temporal adjustment (Cappella, Palmer, & Donzella, 1990), among others. The authors offer their own operational procedures (to be discussed) but no conceptual definition of coordination that either includes or excludes these listed techniques. The problem that the missing definition creates can be illustrated as follows. Suppose the behavioral activity of two conversants begins at moderate levels, and over the course of their interaction the activity levels trail off as the two become fatigued. Random, 10-sec samples will seem to exhibit coordination in behavior, not because the persons are adjusting to one another but rather because they are adjusting to an external force. Clearly, such baseline trends must be removed from the data before coordination (i.e., adjustment to the partner rather than adjustment to external, spurious forces) can be accurately assessed. Without a definition of coordination, we would be forced to accept spuriously caused similarity in behavioral levels as evidence of coordination. Consider, as a second example, the escalation of hostile affect typical in conflicts between husbands and wives (Gottman, 1979). In one sense, the spiraling of action is a kind of coordination; each is responsive to the partner, matching and raising the ante. If this is an example of coordination, then it is certainly not a positive correlate of rapport; if it is not an example of coordination, then does coordination only apply to socially positive or neutral behaviors? If the latter, then how do we account for partners who are attracted to one another in part through adopting complementary patterns of dominant and submissive behaviors (Orford, 1986)? The absence of a definition of coordination does not allow researchers to assess the hypothesis that coordination is important to rapport in general; only in the context of the author's own operational procedures can the hypothesis be evaluated. The authors might respond that their operational definition of coordination responds to these objections and to other problems. Their molar definition of coordination uses judges (or participants) to make evaluations of clips of interaction on scales estimating whether the participants are in sync or in tune with one another. The advantages of this approach are its efficiency in comparison to more molecular approaches, its use of context to assist judgment, and its simultaneous inclusion of interactional meaning with process concerns. The disadvantages are equally serious. The spuriousness problem is not solved. Judgments of coordination, whether by participants or observers, could be confounded with judgments of positivity if judges' implicit theories of social interaction are that positive interactions are ones in which the people are in sync. If this is the case, then the judges would be assessing positivity and not synchrony, and the correlation to rapport would be an artifact. To this, the authors might reply that the Bernieri, Resnick, and Rosenthal (1988) study shows that (a) artificial interactions created on tape to appear as if real and (b) interactions between mothers and strange infants are judged less synchronous than (c) actual interactions between mothers and their own infants. However, I do not think that this evidence is definitive. First, is it possible that the children who were