Suspicious Receivers’ Goals and Behaviors 17
subcategories (i.e., to reduce message, partner, and relationship uncertainty, and to minimize
imposition, to consider the partner’s feeling, and to avoid negative evaluation) as speculate.
When a reported goal appeared to be dissimilar to the existing categories, a new category was
created to accommodate the goal. The author coded all of the interaction goals, blind to the
participants’ strategic behaviors and variable scores. An independent coder implemented the
coding process as a reliability check. Inter-coder reliability for the eleven interaction goals
was .76 (Cohen’s kappa). Participants’ reports about their strategic behaviors while in suspicion
were coded according to the three-strategy typology of passive, active, and interactive strategies
(Berger & Kellermann, 1994). The author and the same independent coder coded the behaviors.
Inter-coder reliability for the seven strategic behaviors was fairly high (Cohen’s kappa = .87).
Results
Preliminary analysis
To investigate the nature of the recalled events, the participants’ outcome involvement
regarding the issue, their emotional valence and the intensity of the emotion were measured.
Overall, individuals reported varying degrees of outcome involvement (M = 4.87, SD = 1.89)
ranging from insignificant (e.g., “I think she pretended to enjoy the movie”) to significant (e.g.,
“ I had a feeing that he is seeing someone else”). In terms of emotion, a majority of the
participants reported experiencing negative emotion (M = 2.42, SD = 1.16; on the scale of 1 to 7,
1 indicating negative and 7 indicating positive). The intensity of the emotion had varying degrees
(M = 4.48, SD = 1.50).
Interaction Goals
The number of interaction goals reported by participants ranged from one to three,
indicating that a suspicious receiver possesses multiple goals in the interaction. Goal categories
and their frequencies are presented in Table 1. First, it was examined to which degree a
Convention