Expectancy Violations Theory

Key Concepts

Expectations are enduring cognitions about the anticipated verbal and nonverbal communication of others. Expectations are comprised of two components, the social and the idiosyncratic. At the social level they encompass the roles, rules, norms, and practices that typify a given culture, community, or context. At the idiosyncratic level, they [Page 368]encompass person-specific knowledge related to another's typical communication practices. Predictions for any given individual, message, or transaction rely on a combination of generic expectancies and any individuating knowledge of how the actor's behavior deviates from those general patterns.

Expectations derive from three classes of variables: actor, relationship, and context. Actor variables refer to characteristics related to individuals, such as their gender, age, or country of origin. For example, women are expected to stand closer to one another than are men; people who are similar in age are expected to stand closer together than pairings of younger and older. People from “contact” cultures are expected to stand closer together than are those from “noncontact” cultures.

Relationship variables refer to characteristics jointly defined by two or more individuals, such as their status, familial relationship, or attraction. When two people are of equal status, they expect to stand closer to one another and use more mutual gaze than when there is a status difference; in the latter case, the more deferential individual may stand at a more respectful distance and avoid direct eye contact. In parent-child relationships, proximity is expected to be closer than in stranger interactions. Likewise, interactions between people who like one another are expected to be characterized by closer proximity and more eye contact than are interactions between people who dislike one another.

Context variables refer to features of the setting and the type of interaction in which communication takes place. Seated interactions have different expectations from standing ones. So do formal interactions relative to informal ones.

The combination of all these factors yields a net expectation for what communication practices are normative. Rather than being a fixed value such as a particular distance or percentage of eye gaze, expectations take the form of a range of behavior that is customary. An expectancy violation occurs when another's behavior falls outside this range and is sufficiently deviant to be noticed. Sometimes violations are registered consciously. Other times, the behavior may fall outside a given Urnen, or perceptual threshold, and still not be noticed at a conscious level. In these cases, whether an expectancy violation has occurred or not falls into a gray area. It may be inferred only from changes in another's behavior that it precipitates.

Expectancy violations are given a valence from positive to negative. The valence is partly governed by communicator reward valence. Reward valence draws from traditional rhetorical views of communicator ethos, in which communicators are evaluated according to character, competence, composure, sociability, and dynamism (among other dimensions of credibility), and from B. F. Skinner's models of reinforcement learning, in which the positive or negative consequences of an act affect subsequent responding. According to EVT, receivers assess (albeit usually unconsciously) the net reward value that a communicator holds for them. Reward valence is influenced by the same classes of factors that influence expectations, such as a person's gender, age, communicator style, status, and attractiveness.

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