Double-Bind Communications and Respondents' Reluctance to Affirm the Validity of Their Self-Disclosures

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Abstract
It was hypothesized that double-bind communications would increase respondents' use of verbal nonimmediacy, a variation in language style which indicates reluctance to affirm the validity of explicit communication content. To assess this hypothesis, a male confederate created conflicting expectations by describing himself as first independent and then dependent to 10 conceptually simple and 10 conceptually complex male participants (as defined by their scores on Tuckman's 1966 Individual Topic Inventory) who were asked to respond with disclosures on similar topics. Further, the confederate acknowledged the incongruity in his self-disclosures to one-half of the participants but not to the other half. As expected, the conceptually complex participants who had not heard the confederate's acknowledgment of incongruity showed the greatest increase in nonimmediacy during their disclosures to the confederate.

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