UNINTENDED EXPERIMENTER BEHAVIOR AS EVALUATED BY JAPANESE AND AMERICAN OBSERVERS.

Six groups of observers rated the behavior of three experimenters interacting with a total of 10 research subjects. Each group of judges (male and female Americans, male and female Japanese who spoke and understood English quite well, and male and female Japanese who spoke and understood English less well) evaluated Es' behavior on the basis of the auditory channel alone and also on the basis of the combination of the auditory and visual channel. Experimenters were found to engage in a variety of unprogrammed behaviors which were significantly related to (a) their Ss' subsequent responses, (b) E's differential vocal emphasis as he read his response alternatives to his Ss, and (c) both the particular expectancy induced in E and whether any expectancy at all had been induced in E. For the purpose of predicting differential vocal emphasis, female judges were better than male judges when rating from the auditory channel alone, but male judges were better than female judges when rating from the visual and auditory channel combined. For the purpose of predicting whether E had been given any expectancy for Ss' responses, American male judges were most effective when rating the visual and auditory channel combined, but when the auditory channel alone was employed, it was the Japanese males who were less familiar with English whose predictive performance was most effective. Each of these two groups of judges appeared to extract very much the same type of information, but each from its own preferred channel of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]