Cognitive Editing of Arguments and Reasons for Requests: Evidence from Think-Aloud Protocols

For several years, scholars have studied how people edit their arguments. In particular, researchers sought the standards arguers apply in deciding whether to suppress or produce an idea in discourse. These standards are thought to be a number of things at once: they are the editorial criteria, the rules people think ought to be respected, the normative background for the interaction, and part of people's implicit theories of communication. The research to date has produced three classes of results. First of all, Hample and Dallinger determined what the editorial standards are (Hample, 1984; Hample & Dallinger, 1985). They finally settled on a list of seven substantive reasons for deciding to suppress an argument: that it won't work, that it is too negative to use, that it would damage one's own self image, that it would harm the other person, that it would injure the relationship between producer and target, that it would be false, or that it would be irrelevant. These standards are also the focal point of the present investigation. A later paper (Hample & Dallinger, 1992) reports that these fall into two or three classes: effectiveness, discourse competence, and person-centered issues. The effectiveness codes (the first two on the list of seven) often combine with the discourse codes (the last two) to form a single factor. The second class of results has related preference for various of the codes to individual differences variables (e.g., Dallinger & Hample, 1991; Hample & Dallinger, 1987; Kosloski, Hinck & Dailey, 1991). This sort of research has dominated the research program, and has been summarized in Hample and Dallinger (1990). There are complex but sensible patterns of relationship between personality and use of the standards. The third sort of work explores the effects of situation on editing. Researchers have found meaningful relations between editing and the valence (liked or disliked) of the message target (Dallinger & Hample, 1991), and between editing and the intimacy and extent of consequences implicated in the situation (Kosloski, Hinck & Dailey, 1991). Based on a cumulation of the data from the early studies, reasonably clear conclusions about the ways in which situational dimensions (e.g., intimacy, dominance, etc.) affect editorial choices are now available (Hample & Dallinger, in press). Hample and Dallinger (1998) have also shown how repeated rebuffs of one's arguments result in one's editorial standards becoming increasingly aggressive and rude. All the work to date has relied mainly on two methodologies. The first two studies, those that generated the list of criteria, supplied respondents with a list of possible messages, and asked people to say which messages they would be willing to use and which they would not. In an open-ended format, respondents were then asked to give explanations for the suppression of the unendorsed arguments. These were coded into categories of editing standards, which were used in the later investigations. The more recent studies provide participants not only with lists of arguments, but also with a checklist of responses. This checklist includes the seven criteria mentioned above, as well as endorsement and residual choices. While I am not dissatisfied with the methodological choices made during the course of the research program, I wish here to triangulate some of the most basic findings, and to explore editing in another research paradigm. This paper is an effort after those ends. Think aloud protocols (see Daly, Weber, Vangelisti, Maxwell & Neel, 1989; Ericsson & Simon, 1985; Flower & Hayes, 1984; Smagorinsky, 1989, 1994) are used here for several reasons. First, they free the respondents from the constraints imposed in the usual research design, since I will not be supplying lists of possible arguments or lists of possible judgments of them. Second, the think-aloud protocols permit us to observe (to some extent) the actual thought processes involved in editing. …