Suspicious Receivers’ Goals and Behaviors 7
suspicion, as an uncertain psychological state due to one’s lack of confidence on judging the
message veracity, is consistent with Berger and Calabrese’s (1975) conceptualization of
uncertainty within interpersonal interaction. Berger and Calabrese reasoned that individuals
experience uncertainty when “there are a number of plausible alternative attributions one might
make for a particular communicative act” (p. 101). In deceptive communication, it appears that a
receiver retroactively attempts to understand the truth behind the partner’s behavior or message
and experiences uncertainty due to the insufficient amount of evidence to ensure one’s veracity
judgment.
The uncertainty that a suspicious receiver may experience, however, could expand
further than that from one’s decreased confidence in one’s ability to make a veracity judgment.
Knobloch and Solomon (2002) propose that an individual’s decreased or lack of confidence in
their perceptions of involvement within interpersonal relationships constitutes “relational
uncertainty” (p. 245). Knobloch and Solomon reason that people begin to doubt their partner’s
participation in the relationship (i.e., partner uncertainty) as well as the relationship itself (i.e.,
relationship uncertainty) as a result of uncertainty increasing events.
Therefore, the present study proposes that a suspicious receiver would experience
uncertainty from three interdependent but distinct sources: message uncertainty, partner
uncertainty, and relationship uncertainty. In addition to the message uncertainty, which is noted
in the definition of suspicion, partner uncertainty and relationship uncertainty are taken into
consideration as reflections of relational uncertainty a suspicious receiver may experience. In
addition, the study posits that uncertainty reduction would be one of the major goals of a
suspicious receiver in deceptive communication. It is assumed that one’s uncertainty reduction
goal would engender information gathering planning, which in turn guides the action. For
example, uncertainty-increasing events were also found to initiate some communicative
Convention