Factors influencing audience design during interpersonal communication

This thesis investigates factors influencing audience design – the communicative act of designing one’s message by considering the perspective of one’s audience. A series of studies were carried out to investigate a number of factors that influence how people design their communication using a referential communication task paradigm. These factors included the degree of interaction with the audience (Chapter 2), group size (Chapters 2 & 3), majority influence (Chapter 3), estimates of communicative effectiveness (Chapter 4), and age (Chapter 4). This thesis provides evidence to suggest that: In an interactive context people are less likely to design their initial message compared with a non-interactive context; increasing audience size does not influence audience design; the presence of a majority perspective within a group audience will increase a person’s tendency to engage in audience design; estimates of communicative effectiveness influence audience design by making people less likely to design due to commonly appraising their own perspective to be superior to the perspective of the audience; older adults are less inclined to engage in audience design compared to younger adults. This thesis adds to the audience design literature by illustrating how a number of different factors can act to increase or decrease audience design behaviour.