Development and test of a cognitive rules model of interaction goals

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Abstract
Although scholars frequently describe communication as goal oriented, they offer limited detail about how people form interaction goals in situations. This paper presents a “Cognitive Rules” model which specifies assumptions about the structures and processes underlying goal formation. According to the model, people represent their knowledge about goals within an associative network model of memory, which contains cognitive rules linking situational features and desired outcomes. People's likelihood of forming a goal depends on the accessibility of relevant cognitive rules as well as the fit between perceived situational features and rules. An experiment testing these assumptions is reported. As predicted, a priming manipulation influenced interaction goals in attributionally ambiguous but not in attributionally clear compliance‐gaining situations. Unexpectedly, the effect of priming on goals occurred only for people high in construct differentiation. Implications of these findings for accounts of goal formation and message production are discussed.