Communication Research

Alternative explanations for the thrice-replicated interaction between the presence andabsence of population data andsex on apprehension andvictimization risk were examined. Consistent with three previous experiments, men first exposed to population increase data were less apprehensive after reading a news story containing frequency depictions of increasing threat than were men not first exposed to population data. Women's apprehension levels were unaffected by exposure to population data. However, this interaction was reversedwhen a thought-listing task was interpolatedbetween the threatening story and the apprehension judgments. Although men showed significantly higher statistical skill levels than did women and individuals with higher levels of statistical skill reportedless apprehension, statistical skill did not account for the observedinteraction between sex andexposure to population data. Analyses of cognitive responses suggested that although both women and men heed relevant base-rate data, these data prompt men and women to alter the production of different cognitive responses. Sex differences in reportedapprehension as a function of exposure to base-rate data appear to be mediated by different cognitive responses to base-rate data.

In organizational settings, a communication dilemma exists whenever the interests of a collective (i.e., team, organization, interorganizational alliance) demand that people share privately held information, but their individual interests insteadmotivate them to withholdit. This article develops andtests an expectancy model that predicts specific conditions under which collective benefits can be made to converge with private ones, thus resolving communication dilemmas and motivating voluntary contributions to a collectively shared database. In the model, motivation is a multiplicative function of individual-level attitudes and beliefs: (a) organizational commitment; (b) organizational instrumentality, an instrumentality that links successful collective information sharing to broader organizational gain; (c) connective efficacy, an expectation that information contributedto the database will reach other members of the collective; and(d) information self-efficacy, the self-perceivedvalue of a contributor's information to other database users. The model was tested by a survey administered to members of an intact work team using a discretionary database. The multiplicative model was significant and explained sizeable amounts of variance in the motivation to contribute discretionary information. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. The model can be readily extended to predict information sharing by means of other communication media.

An experiment with 520 college students tested whether heightened awareness of cognitive processes during media exposure would affect the message interpretation process by enhancing skepticism, with the enhanced skepticism influencing both affective and cognitive aspects of decision making. Skepticism has affective andlogical components, which can be representedby trust (more affective) andperceivedrealism (more logical), andskepticism's effects on affective and logical decision making are manifested somewhat differently. The results of this study suggest that a minimal intervention that activates skepticism can have both direct and indirect effects on the message interpretation process that can improve the quality of decision making.

This study examines whether readers of the paper and online versions of a national newspaper acquire different perceptions of the importance of political issues. Using data from a weeklong experiment in which subjects either readthe print version of the New York Times, the online version of that paper, or received no special exposure, this study finds evidence that people exposed to the Times for 5 days adjusted their agendas in response to that exposure and that print readers modified their agendas differently than did online readers.