Artifactual Evidence in Research and Teaching: Invalidity in Judgments of Communicative Behavior.

N

15

Behavior Patterns; Communication (Thought Transfer); Educational Research; Higher Education; Human Relations; Literature Reviews; Models; Teaching

This paper contains a discussion concerning some of the variables which threaten external validity and inferences about communicative behavior made by researchers and teachers. Communication researchers have begun to explore potentially artifactual sources of variance in judgments of evaluations of communicative behavior. Some studies have shown that not only can expectations about another person's behavior affect the perceptions or judgments of an ostensibly objective observer, but such expectations may alter the behavior of the person being observed (known as the Pygmalion Effect). Observer bias, experimenter expectancy, and Pygmalion effects are sometimes called "artifactual effects" or "experimental artifacts." A tentative model of potentially artifactual outcomes in communication assessment is offered. (RB)

1975

ED103932