Inventional repertoires and written messages.(Report)

Theories of message production (Greene, 1997a) are mainly dominated by the goals-plan-action (GPA) model (Dillard, 2004), although an important exception is the local management of meaning (LMM) theory posited by O'Keefe and Lambert (1995). The GPA model says that, upon coming into contact with a recognizable social situation (Dillard & Solomon, 2000), people spontaneously form interaction goals, particularly including a primary goal that flames the situation. This goal in turn stimulates one or more message plans (Berger, 1997) that may be edited to conform with various secondary goals, such as politeness and anxiety motives (Hample & Dallinger, 1990; Meyer, 1997). The plan, whether revised or not, then immediately generates the message, or action. In O'Keefe and Lambert's alternative theory, contact with a situation immediately stimulates a small world of available cognitions, and these are then locally managed, or read off, into a message, as directed by the speaker's construal of the situation.

Both approaches presuppose the existence of a message repertoire, a stock of available content that can be altered or used as is. A repertoire is a collection of things that a person might say, similar to the inventory that constitutes what a retail store could sell. Repertoires are cognitive in that they are held in the mind. Repertorial items (i.e., nascent messages) are stimulated or called out by particular circumstances. Each repertorial item is something that the situation seems to require or might allow, or something that the person is just predisposed to say. Our methodology required that respondents report their repertoires as lists of possible remarks, but we believe that the natural phenomenon is that a single item is assembled and activated (Greene, 1997b), evaluated for effectiveness and propriety (Meyer, 1997), and then either used, edited for use, or abandoned so that another candidate message can then be activated and assembled.

Our theoretical understanding of this selection and production process is essentially that of a TOTE unit (test-operate-test-exit), a standard model of cognitive processes (Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960). The testing process consists of comparing the possible message to the goals the person is pursuing (Meyer, 1997). Deficiencies are repaired by various editorial operations (Hample, 2000), the revision is tested, the sequence repeats itself as necessary, and the process eventually exits with either an acceptable message or a discarded one. Potential messages that cannot be repaired are abandoned, and the process begins anew with the next repertorial candidate. The most basic idea here is that whatever is expressed must first have existed in the speaker's mind. The repertoire is what first existed cognitively. A successful repertorial item passes through a system rather like a TOTE unit and is finally transformed from a private mental item into a public message element.

The GPA model positions this repertoire at the planning stage, since the plans consist of things, often sequenced, that can be said or done (e.g., KeHermann, Broetzmann, Lim, & Kitao, 1989). For instance, one might plan to say hello, then remark that one's car needs repair, and so forth, and these are the repertorial elements. The local management of meaning theory is quite directly about the repertoire, and how it supplies the content elements for the eventual message. Several studies have shown this latter relationship (e.g., Lambert & Gillespie, 1994; O'Keefe & Lambert, 1995). However, the GPA researchers have had little to say about the repertoires, and the LMM work simply shows that people need to think things before they can say them. The repertoires are more interesting than that, and more detailed study will be productive.

A program of research on these repertoires has begun, under the title of inventional capacity (Hample, 2004, 2005b). Inventional capacity (IC) is operationalized as the number of things a person lists when asked to write down whatever he or she can think of to say when confronted with a social situation that seems to call for communication.

The early work focused on the size of the repertoire (i.e., the length of a respondent's list). Work generating the following findings is conveniently summarized in Hample (2005a, 2005b). Repertorial size is mainly related to cognitive ability. It is positively correlated with creativity, several measures of academic ability, and interpersonal construct differentiation. It does not correlate with trait measures of argumentativeness or verbal aggressiveness. Inventional capacity is fairly constant from situation to situation, whether the stimuli seem to call for persuasion, forgiveness, comforting, or initial acquaintance messages.

Other research began the project of examining the actual content of the repertoires (also summarized in Hample, 2005a, 2005b). As one moves through the repertoire from the first-listed item to the last, the items' politeness remains fairly constant, but the later-listed items are rated as less usual by the person doing the listing. Most of the repertorial elements have mainly to do with the central argument (e.g., giving a reason for a friend to do one a favor), and nearly all can be characterized as being about the argument, or face issues, or both.