Multiple-Audience Problems, Tactical Communication, and Social Interaction: A Relational-Regulation Perspective

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a relational perspective as a framework for understanding the ways in which tactical communication and impression management can frame and channel social interaction and self-perception processes. The chapter describes a class of social dilemmas that current theories of communication, impression management, self-presentation, and interpersonal perception largely ignore. The chapter offers the metaphor as a heuristic and useful organizational framework for considering several varieties of human tactical communication and social interaction behavior. The chapter examines the tactical-communicative and self-concept maintenance properties of relational-regulation behaviors (distancing and embracing behaviors, and mixed or hidden message communications). The chapter surveys a program of experimental research that examines both the inter- and intrapersonal consequences of relational regulation. This research suggests that applying a relational-regulation perspective to interpersonal behavior may help organize and synthesize research and theory from a number of disparate areas—including dispositional inference, self-perception, impression management, psycholinguistics, symbolic interactionism, and interpersonal communication.