THE INTERPRETATION OF COERCIVE COMMUNICATION - THE EFFECTS OF MODE OFINFLUENCE, POWERFUL SPEECH, AND SPEAKER AUTHORITY

Social systems devise rules for member conduct and often specify punit ive action for nonconformity. However, confronting and signaling the i ntent to punish a rule violator may be an inherently face-threatening and volatile situation As such, in this paper we seek to add to the re search aimed at minimizing the negative effects of confrontation We co nducted an experiment to examine the impact of linguistic cues and coe rcive potential on message categorization and on receiver perceptions of threat and face-sensitivity. Results suggest that threats might be considered a special class of warnings, distinguishable by a speaker-b ased locus of punishment. Locus of punishment did not, however, impact perceptions of having been warned These findings thus call into quest ion the assumed parallelism between researcher conceptualizations of t hreats and warnings and those of typical language-users. Additionally, targets reported feeling less threatened and perceived more face-sens itivity, in cases when the speaker was not the source of punishment. P erceptions of threat were decreased when disclaimers were employed and where the message originated from a peer rather than an authority. Po wer of speech had an impact in ambiguous situations. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed.