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The Stability of Nonverbal Behaviour: An Action-Production Approach to Problems of Cross-Situational Consistency and Discriminativeness

Department of Communication, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, U.S.A.

Two decades of extensive research and intense debate have served to make clear that human behaviour is characterised by both stability and variation over time and across situations. It remains, however, to articulate a coherent theoretical account detailing the processes of person-situation interaction that give rise to this consistency and discriminativeness. Toward this end, requirements for an adequate interactional theory are reviewed. Central to the approach taken here is the assumption that because consistency and discriminativeness are properties of behaviour, these phenomena are likely to be understood only by recourse to models of behavioural production. The second section of the article then summarises a cognitive model specifying the structures and control processes comprising the behavioural output system. This model permits a reconceptualisation of individual dispositions and situational influences in terms consistent with the properties of the output system. Finally, the model is extended to the realm of nonverbal behaviour to make explicit claims concerning those conditions under which behavioural stability should be enhanced.

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