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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 3, No. 2, 266-269 (1977)
DOI: 10.1177/014616727700300223
© 1977 Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Information-Gathering Properties of a Nonverbal Reinforcer: An Effect of Expectancy Violation

J. Curtis Russell

University of Alabama in Birmingham

Janet Buckworth

University of Alabama in Birmingham

Richard Case

University of Alabama in Birmingham

W. Kent Upshaw

University of Alabama in Birmingham

A 2-person tutoring task was used to investigate the possibility that one individual's nonverbal reinforcers can be used in an attempt to gain information from the other person. Information- seeking behavior is increased by expectancy-violation (Brickman, 1972). Increasing a reinforcer's occurrance by violating an expectancy would suggest that the reinforcer also serves to gain information. A nonverbal reinforcer, head nodding, was monitored in a 2 x 2 design orthogonally manipulating (1) instructed expectancies of "good" vs. "poor" perfor mance by a confederate-student and (2) "good" vs. "poor" actual perfor mance. Violating subject-tutors' expectancies resulted in significantly greater head nodding. Also, a hypothesized lack of relationship was found between task-specific behaviors (informative comments and praise) and head nodding, not required to perform the task.


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