How people disqualify: Experimental studies of spontaneous written disqualification

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Abstract
Disqualification is nonstraightforward communication — messages that say something without really saying it. The four experiments described here examined whether naive, normal individuals might generate disqualified messages. The participants were presented with hypothetical communicative conflicts to which they wrote their own replies. These messages were significantly higher in quantitative measures of disqualification than were the messages written in control conditions. Our conclusion is that disqualified communication is a systematic product of the sender's situation and that anyone trying to avoid saying something will generate such messages.

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