Abstract
Speakers systematically overestimate their communication effectiveness (Keysar & Henly, 2002). We argue that doing so is adaptive, reducing the risk of social anxiety and withdrawal from social situations. This hypothesis was tested by having speakers who scored low and high for fear of negative evaluation (FNE), a hallmark of social phobia, attempt to convey a specific meaning of ambiguous statements to a listener and then estimate their communication effectiveness. Low-FNE speakers consistently overestimated their effectiveness, expecting the listener to understand their intended meaning more often than listeners actually did. In contrast, high-FNE speakers’ estimates of communication effectiveness were consistent with the listener’s actual understanding. Signal detection analysis revealed that low- and high-FNE speakers were equally able to discriminate communication success from failure, but low-FNE speakers exhibited a stronger positive response bias. In conclusion, overestimating one’s communication effectiveness is adaptive, and accurate estimation is associated with dysfunction.
References
Alden, L. E., & Taylor, C. T. (2004). Interpersonal processes in social phobia. Clinical Psychology Review, 24, 857–882.
Alden, L. E., & Wallace, S. T. (1995). Social phobia and social appraisal in successful and unsuccessful social interactions. Behaviour Research & Therapy, 33, 497–505.
Allbritton, D. W., McKoon, G., & Ratcliff, R. (1996). Reliability of prosodic cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 22, 714–735.
Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (1979). Judgment of contingency in depressed and non-depressed students: Sadder but wiser? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 108, 441–485.
Altmann, G. T. M. (1998). Ambiguity in sentence processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2, 146–152.
American Psychiatric Association (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., text revision). Washington, DC: Author.
Amin, N., Foa, E. B., & Coles, M. E. (1998). Negative interpretation bias in social phobia. Behaviour Research & Therapy, 36, 945–957.
Bandura, A. (1989). Human agency in social cognitive theory. American Psychologist, 44, 1175–1184.
Clark, D. M., & Wells, A. (1995). A cognitive model of social phobia. In R. G. Heimberg, M. R. Liebowitz, D. A. Hope, & F. R. Schneier (Eds.), Social phobia: Diagnosis, assessment, and treatment (pp. 69–93). New York: Guilford.
Clark, L. A., & Watson, D. (1990). Theoretical and empirical issues in differentiating depression from anxiety. In J. Becker & A. Kleinman (Eds.), Psychological aspects of depression (pp. 39–65). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Constans, J. I., Penn, D. L., Ihen, G. H., & Hope, D. A. (1999). Interpretive biases for ambiguous stimuli in social anxiety. Behaviour Research & Therapy, 37, 643–651.
Hirsch, C. R., & Clark, D. M. (2004). Information-processing bias in social phobia. Clinical Psychology Review, 24, 799–825.
Hirsch, C. R., & Mathews, A. (1997). Interpretative inferences when reading about emotional events. Behaviour Research & Therapy, 35, 1123–1132.
Hirsch, C. R., & Mathews, A. (2000). Impaired positive inferential bias in social phobia. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109, 705–712.
Keysar, B., & Henly, A. S. (2002). Speakers’ overestimation of their effectiveness. Psychological Science, 13, 207–212.
Kuiper, N. A., & Derry, P. A. (1982). Depressed and nondepressed content self-reference in mild depressives. Journal of Personality, 50, 67–79.
Lovibond, P. F., & Lovibond, S. H. (1995). The structure of negative emotional states: Comparison of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) with the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories. Behaviour Research & Therapy, 33, 335–343.
Macmillan, N. A., & Creelman, C. D. (1991). Detection theory: A user’s guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Murphy, R., Hirsch, C. R., Mathews, A., Smith, K., & Clark, D. M. (2007). Facilitating a benign interpretation bias in a high socially anxious population. Behaviour Research & Therapy, 45, 1517–1529.
Price, P. J., Ostendorf, M., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Fong, C. (1991). The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 90, 2956–2970.
Rapee, R. M., & Heimberg, R. G. (1997). A cognitive-behavioral model of anxiety in social phobia. Behaviour Research & Therapy, 35, 741–756.
Rapee, R. M., & Lim, L. (1992). Discrepancy between self- and observer ratings of performance in social phobics. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 101, 728–731.
Savitsky, K., & Gilovich, T. (2003). The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 618–625.
Schober, M. F., & Conrad, F. G. (1997). Does conversational interviewing reduce survey measurement error? Public Opinion Quarterly, 61, 576–602.
Snodgrass, J. G., & Corwin, J. (1988). Pragmatics of measuring recognition memory: Applications to dementia and amnesia. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 117, 34–50.
Sweeny, K., Carroll, P. J., & Shepperd, J. A. (2006). Is optimism always best? Future outlooks and preparedness. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 302–306.
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193–210.
Watson, D., & Friend, R. (1969). Measurement of social-evaluative anxiety. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology, 33, 448–457.
Wilson, E. J., MacLeod, C., Mathews, A., & Rutherford, E. M. (2006). The causal role of interpretive bias in anxiety reactivity. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 115, 103–111.
Woody, S. R., & Rodriguez, B. F. (2000). Self-focused attention and social anxiety in social phobics and normal controls. Cognitive Therapy & Research, 24, 473–488.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported by a University of Western Australia grant awarded to the first and second authors.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fay, N., Page, A.C., Serfaty, C. et al. Speaker overestimation of communication effectiveness and fear of negative evaluation: Being realistic is unrealistic. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 15, 1160–1165 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1160
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1160