Affect and Social Information Acquisition: Sit Back, Relax, and Tell Me About Yourself

Does Your Facebook Profile Help You or Harm You? Examining the Effect of Information Seeking Strategies on Relational Outcomes in Social Networking Sites

“…When comparing the effect of passive URS and interactive URS on uncertainty reduction, it was predicted that interactive URS (i.e., chatting with their partners) would lead to a greater reduction in uncertainty compared to passive URS (i.e., just looking at their partners' profile and gaining information). This is in accordance with findings from previous research that have shown that interactive URS are most amenable in CMC (Tidwell & Walther, 2002), and strategies like direct questioning and selfdisclosures are more effective for gaining information about others compared to just passively observing them (Kellerman & Berger, 1983;Berger & Kellerman, 1984).…”

“…In their study on URS in SNS, Antheunis et al (2010) found that interactive URS was the only strategy that was effective in reducing uncertainty between partners. At first glance, these results seem to provide compelling evidence to corroborate the claim that interactive strategies of information seeking are more effective compared to passive and active URS (Berger & Kellerman, 1984;Tidwell & Walther, 2002). However, the methodological flaws of Antheunis et al's (2010) study compromise the validity of the claim that interactive strategies are the most effective URS for reducing uncertainty.…”

“…Asking the stranger questions and eliciting self-disclosures from him/her is more convenient and leads to more information about the stranger compared to unobtrusively observing the stranger or finding a third party and asking him or her about the stranger. This has ultimately led to the assumption that interactive URS is the most preferred and the most effective strategy for strangers to gain information about each other (Kellerman & Berger, 1984). The relative inconvenience of using active and passive strategies compared to interactive strategies during initial face-to-face conversations could have impeded efforts of comparing the three strategies on their effectiveness in reducing uncertainty.…”

“…Lastly, interactive URS involves interacting with the target person. Even though information seeking behaviors between strangers in face-to-face communication has been a widely researched topic (Berber & Kellerman, 1994;Douglas, 1991Douglas, , 1994Kellerman & Berger, 1984), none of these studies have compared the three strategies of information seeking with each other to investigate if the uncertainty reduction resulting from the use of one strategy is different from the other. Given that the nature or the process of information seeking that is facilitated by active, passive, and interactive URS is substantially different from each other (Berger, 1979), it should stand to reason that the amount and type of information gained about the target person as a result of using the three strategies should be different as well.…”

Translating scholarship into practice: Communication studies reflecting the value of theory‐based research to everyday life

“…URT's coding procedures help to identify three levels of social information (demographic data, personal beliefs, and attributing reasons to explain another's behavior) and the tactics used to avoid giving social information (topic-changing, asking questions yourself, and nonverbal disinterest). Berger and Kellermann (1983) and Kellermann and Berger (1984) conducted two URT studies from a common data base of interactants. In the 1983 study, judges 95 JACR MAY 1999 coded videotaped conversations for amount of information-seeking, degree of social appropriateness, and the efficiency with which the persons met their information-seeking goal.…”