Expectancy Violations Theory, is based from an article Judee Burgoon wrote entitled Nonverbal Expectancy Violations Model for HCR which explains how individuals could violate the expectation in an assessed interpersonal distance with the person they are communicating with.
At first she used the term personal space as the 1 “invisible variable volume of space surrounding an individual that defines that individual’s preferred distance from others”. The idea came from Edward Hall’s coined term proxemics. He claimed that Americans have four proxemic zones:
Intimate distance: 0 to 18 inches
Personal distance: 18 inches to 4 feet
social distance 4 to 10 feet
Public distance: 10 feet to infinity
But then she discarded the idea of a “threat threshold” when she realized that proxemic behavior is part of an interconnected system of nonlinguistic cues. She also edited out some other points that lead to the birth of the Expectation Violations Theory or EVT.
There are three core concepts of EVT. These are: expectancy, violation valence, and communicator reward valence. The term expectancy is used to describe what both parties predict would happen. Expectations arise when our mind automatically process the context, type of relationship, and characteristic of people to predict what they’d do.
Context deals with the cultural norms and the setting of the conversation. Relationship includes 2“similarity, familiarity, liking, and relative status”. It assesses how well you know each other. Communicator characteristics include biography, physical appearance, personality, and the way the communicator communicates.
Violation valence refers to the value we place on a specific unexpected behavior made by any person we are communicating with. This may be positive or negative. Some unexpected actions are easy to identify while others may mean more than we expect them to mean.
Lastly, communicator reward valence refers to our ability to audit or sum up the positive or negative deed and evaluate whether we will reward or punish that person or not. We usually assess people by their features, the nonverbal cues they make, or their verbal replies.
For example, I had a friend when I was in high school. We've been together for two years. On one occasion, one of my teachers decided to have an open forum as a class activity. My friend stood up to talk right after the girl I dislike in class talked, and her topic was faintly about me. I expected that she'd stood up for me but surprisingly she told everyone how she hated my ill-tempered attitude. It would have been nice to tell me what I did wrong but to tell it in front of the class and not privately didn't seem right. To think we'd spend most of our time talking with each other. Her action of talking against me in front of the whole class my expectations was the violation valence. Naturally I'd place a negative value on her. Realizing she wasn't a good friend I decided to cut all my communication with her as soon as I transfered to a new school.
Now Burgoon has created the Interaction Adaptation Theory, an expiation and extension of EVT. She assessed EVT’s single sided view. She used the term interaction positive to describe our ability to adapt to each other to fit our thoughts and feelings with the person’s actions. It’s made up of three factors. Requirements are the basic needs we humans need as seen in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Contrary to these are our expectations as explained above. Lastly are the things we desire or would want to happen.
These factors control what we need, anticipate, and prefer in a conversation. This theory aim to deal with two problems in EVT that Burgoon outlined:
3 “First, EVT does not fully account for the overwhelming prevalence of reciprocity that has been found in interpersonal interactions. Second, it is silent on whether communication valence supersedes behavior valence or vice versa when the two are incongruent (such as when a disliked partner engages in a positive violation”
Reference:
1 Griffin, Em (2006) A First Look at Communication Theory 6th ed. (p. 84) Boston, MA: v McGraw Hill
2 Griffin, Em (2006) A First Look at Communication Theory 6th ed. (p. 89) Boston, MA: McGraw Hill
3 Griffin, Em (2006) A First Look at Communication Theory 6th ed. (p.93) Boston, MA: McGraw Hill
At first she used the term personal space as the 1 “invisible variable volume of space surrounding an individual that defines that individual’s preferred distance from others”. The idea came from Edward Hall’s coined term proxemics. He claimed that Americans have four proxemic zones:
Intimate distance: 0 to 18 inches
Personal distance: 18 inches to 4 feet
social distance 4 to 10 feet
Public distance: 10 feet to infinity
But then she discarded the idea of a “threat threshold” when she realized that proxemic behavior is part of an interconnected system of nonlinguistic cues. She also edited out some other points that lead to the birth of the Expectation Violations Theory or EVT.
There are three core concepts of EVT. These are: expectancy, violation valence, and communicator reward valence. The term expectancy is used to describe what both parties predict would happen. Expectations arise when our mind automatically process the context, type of relationship, and characteristic of people to predict what they’d do.
Context deals with the cultural norms and the setting of the conversation. Relationship includes 2“similarity, familiarity, liking, and relative status”. It assesses how well you know each other. Communicator characteristics include biography, physical appearance, personality, and the way the communicator communicates.
Violation valence refers to the value we place on a specific unexpected behavior made by any person we are communicating with. This may be positive or negative. Some unexpected actions are easy to identify while others may mean more than we expect them to mean.
Lastly, communicator reward valence refers to our ability to audit or sum up the positive or negative deed and evaluate whether we will reward or punish that person or not. We usually assess people by their features, the nonverbal cues they make, or their verbal replies.
For example, I had a friend when I was in high school. We've been together for two years. On one occasion, one of my teachers decided to have an open forum as a class activity. My friend stood up to talk right after the girl I dislike in class talked, and her topic was faintly about me. I expected that she'd stood up for me but surprisingly she told everyone how she hated my ill-tempered attitude. It would have been nice to tell me what I did wrong but to tell it in front of the class and not privately didn't seem right. To think we'd spend most of our time talking with each other. Her action of talking against me in front of the whole class my expectations was the violation valence. Naturally I'd place a negative value on her. Realizing she wasn't a good friend I decided to cut all my communication with her as soon as I transfered to a new school.
Now Burgoon has created the Interaction Adaptation Theory, an expiation and extension of EVT. She assessed EVT’s single sided view. She used the term interaction positive to describe our ability to adapt to each other to fit our thoughts and feelings with the person’s actions. It’s made up of three factors. Requirements are the basic needs we humans need as seen in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Contrary to these are our expectations as explained above. Lastly are the things we desire or would want to happen.
These factors control what we need, anticipate, and prefer in a conversation. This theory aim to deal with two problems in EVT that Burgoon outlined:
3 “First, EVT does not fully account for the overwhelming prevalence of reciprocity that has been found in interpersonal interactions. Second, it is silent on whether communication valence supersedes behavior valence or vice versa when the two are incongruent (such as when a disliked partner engages in a positive violation”
Reference:
1 Griffin, Em (2006) A First Look at Communication Theory 6th ed. (p. 84) Boston, MA: v McGraw Hill
2 Griffin, Em (2006) A First Look at Communication Theory 6th ed. (p. 89) Boston, MA: McGraw Hill
3 Griffin, Em (2006) A First Look at Communication Theory 6th ed. (p.93) Boston, MA: McGraw Hill
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